All Blog Posts Tagged 'metrics' - RecruitingBlogs2015-03-31T20:43:05Zhttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profiles/blog/feed?tag=metrics&xn_auth=noThe Suckiness of Phone Time Reportstag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2014-04-01:502551:BlogPost:17977432014-04-01T17:30:00.000ZDoug Douglas - DX2 Consultinghttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/DougDouglas
<p><a href="http://dougx2.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/phone-time.png" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="http://dougx2.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/phone-time.png?w=300&amp;width=300" width="300"></img></a> Recruiters have lots of metrics that they are measured on, but the most worthless of them all is the Phone Time Report. This is the report that shows how much time a recruiter spends on the phone each day/week/month.</p>
<p>Some live by this report, and for the life of me, I just can't see why. It is filled with abuses and does not accurately reflect the production level or successes of a…</p>
<p><a href="http://dougx2.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/phone-time.png" target="_blank"><img src="http://dougx2.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/phone-time.png?w=300&amp;width=300" width="300" class="align-left"/></a>Recruiters have lots of metrics that they are measured on, but the most worthless of them all is the Phone Time Report. This is the report that shows how much time a recruiter spends on the phone each day/week/month.</p>
<p>Some live by this report, and for the life of me, I just can't see why. It is filled with abuses and does not accurately reflect the production level or successes of a recruiter.</p>
<p>I first become familiar with the Phone Time Report several years ago as I had a new VP who thought this was a vital measurement of the success or failure of our recruiters. We would have team meetings and emails and conversations about how THIS was the key indicator of recruiting greatness, or recruiting slothfulness.</p>
<p>Our executive team touted it, therefore our Directors touted it, therefore our Team Leads touted it. Some of our recruiters really began to focus their attention on getting their name on the leaderboard of the Phone Time Report. I was not one of these recruiters....I wanted to be on the top of another leaderboard - the Who Filled the Most Jobs leaderboard.</p>
<p>One day, our VP called me into his office and said, "Doug, I was going over the Phone Time Report and I see that you have the lowest phone time of all of our recruiters." He looked up at me with the anticipation of an answer. I obliged by saying, "Yes."</p>
<p>I then asked him a question. I said, "If you have that report, then I'm assuming that you also have a report that shows who has filled the most jobs, right?" He said that he did. So I asked him to pull up that report...he did. I asked, "Whose name is at the top of that report?" He replied, "Your name is. How do you explain that?"</p>
<p>I explained to my VP that it wasn't about who talked to the most people or who spent the most time talking to people, but that what mattered is talking to the right people. If you talk to the right people, then you don't have to talk to as many people in order to fill the job.</p>
<p>I went on to explain that some recruiters take the approach that they will speak with anyone in the hopes that there will be enough there to move forward with a candidate, but that I took a different approach. I only spoke with people that I knew were a fit for the job and the purpose of my call was to verify what I believed to be true about the candidate and to see if any surprises came up that would keep me from moving forward with a candidate.</p>
<p>I also explained that I could get my name on the top of that Phone Time Report if I did as others in the office and called into webcasts and then muted my phone and left for lunch so my phone minutes would be racking up while I was down the street eating a cheeseburger. Or I could add some minutes by chit-chatting it up with every candidate that I call and stretch those calls out as long as possible. I could call a bunch of wrong candidates and add a lot of time to my meter that way too. OR - I could just keep doing what I was doing and fill the jobs so we could get paid.</p>
<p>I was never asked about the Phone Time Report again after that conversation.</p>
<p>The better metrics for measuring the productivity and success of a recruiter would be:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Number of total days open</strong></li>
<li><strong>Number of candidates screened vs submitted</strong></li>
<li><strong>Number of candidates submitted vs number interviewed</strong></li>
<li><strong>Number of interviews to make a hire</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>These metrics will tell you if the recruiter is on the same page as the hiring manager and if they are talking to the right people. If these numbers are out of whack, then either the recruiter didn't understand the position, there was a misunderstanding between the hiring manager and the recruiter, or the hiring manager doesn't really know what he/she is looking for an needs some assistance from HR.</p>
<p>Obviously, a good recruiter is going to have to be on the phone. It's a requirement of the job and necessary to move things along. However, telling me how much time someone has spent on the phone doesn't tell me if they are successful or not.</p>Marketing Metrics HR Vendors Will Soon Be Paying a Lot of Attention Totag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2014-03-27:502551:BlogPost:17970322014-03-27T17:42:54.000ZMark Willamanhttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/HRmarketer
<p><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/omkt7cwbhXJpE7-i1uTCPwOwtpzJ0FtC1-PuccUzZexyNou2a8-iiWkLV6UGxXJ1vTCyXGOJzJvGpBy1i5Zaeg9Vn7Wr97ap/Twitter_demographics264x300.jpg" target="_self"><img class="align-left" src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/omkt7cwbhXJpE7-i1uTCPwOwtpzJ0FtC1-PuccUzZexyNou2a8-iiWkLV6UGxXJ1vTCyXGOJzJvGpBy1i5Zaeg9Vn7Wr97ap/Twitter_demographics264x300.jpg?width=264" style="padding: 5px;" width="264"></img></a> In an excellent Barron’s article from earlier this year titled “<a href="http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424053111904710004579360891658884968.html?mod=BOL_twm_col#articleTabs_article%3D1" target="_blank">It’s Not the Earnings, It’s ‘The Metrics’ That Really Matter</a>,” Tiernan Ray…</p>
<p><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/omkt7cwbhXJpE7-i1uTCPwOwtpzJ0FtC1-PuccUzZexyNou2a8-iiWkLV6UGxXJ1vTCyXGOJzJvGpBy1i5Zaeg9Vn7Wr97ap/Twitter_demographics264x300.jpg" target="_self"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/omkt7cwbhXJpE7-i1uTCPwOwtpzJ0FtC1-PuccUzZexyNou2a8-iiWkLV6UGxXJ1vTCyXGOJzJvGpBy1i5Zaeg9Vn7Wr97ap/Twitter_demographics264x300.jpg?width=264" width="264" style="padding: 5px;" class="align-left"/></a>In an excellent Barron’s article from earlier this year titled “<a href="http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424053111904710004579360891658884968.html?mod=BOL_twm_col#articleTabs_article%3D1" target="_blank">It’s Not the Earnings, It’s ‘The Metrics’ That Really Matter</a>,” Tiernan Ray writes:</p>
<p>“The Metrics are those details of an earnings announcement that defy traditional headline news, the sort of stuff buried a paragraph or two down in the press release, below the revenue and earnings numbers, that can be scanned by non-human eyes before it can be fully absorbed by the human mind.”</p>
<p>The prime example, he writes, was Twitter’s fourth-quarter 2013 earnings report. Twitter beat Wall Street’s expectations and projected higher revenue for this year. Then its stock tanked 24%.</p>
<p>Why? This metric:</p>
<p>1. ‘Active’ users were lower than expectations.</p>
<p>LinkedIn provided another example. It too announced earnings in Q4 2013 that beat expectations, but beneath the revenue numbers were these unsatisfying metrics:</p>
<p>1. Unique visitors declined.</p>
<p>2. Page views were down.</p>
<p>In social, metrics such as user growth and engagement are what matters, equally or more so than revenue results. Look at Yelp. Its shares recently rose in spite of profit estimates being cut. Why? You got it, improving “metrics.” In Yelp’s case, the number of “Active” businesses on the service rose faster than the prior quarter.</p>
<p>These stories provide insights into the metrics that will soon be top of mind for marketing departments, and they have to do with the value of your network on social. The metrics used to value your network will matter because there is a direct monetary value in your social network.</p>
<p>If you’re an “<strong>influencer</strong>,” the value of your network matters because it impacts your billable rates and advertising prices.</p>
<p>If you’re an <strong>analyst</strong> it matters because it’s a sign of authority, credibility and influence—things buyers expect from analysts.</p>
<p>And if you’re a <strong>vendor</strong> it matters because the more relevant (e.g., targeted) and “active” your network, the more likely you are to have higher engagement from that network — and this impacts revenue. And if you are a recruiter - well, you know the value (<em><span class="font-size-1">recruiters, no surprise, are way ahead of the curve in understanding how to build valuable networks and leveraging the value of their networks - in the HR marketplace the recruiters and recruiting vendors have always been the leaders in using technology to do their jobs better and improve their products</span></em>). </p>
<p>Have you been buying Twitter followers or Facebook likes? Sorry, bad idea as this <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag" target="_blank">viral Facebook Fraud video</a> explains. Network size, if not made up of the right people, hurts you. Size isn’t as important as metrics such as audience demographics and engagement. Soon, this will be painfully obvious to you, your competitors and the marketplace.</p>
<p>Let’s say your HR technology company just hired an agency to increase the size of your social network. Things are looking good. Your Twitter network has grown to 225,000 followers, the aggregate follower count for your Followers is over 500 million and in a typical month you’re getting hundreds of retweets, mentions and favorites. What if you knew that:</p>
<ul>
<li>60% of your followers are inactive (haven’t tweeted in two-plus months)</li>
<li>10% are bots (not managed by a human)</li>
<li>10% are not relevant (have nothing to do with your industry)</li>
</ul>
<p>OK — maybe that’s not so bad. At least 45,000 are targeted and they seem to be engaged with you. But are they? Of the 20% that are active and relevant, what if only 10% meet your desired geographic location, job title and company size? And of this group, what if less than 1% have ever actively engaged with any of your social updates or content? And of this 1%, what if their aggregate follower count is under 50,000?</p>
<p>How are you feeling now?</p>
<p>What if you had this information for not only your brand, but also for your competition and the influencers and analysts you’re thinking of hiring or inviting to your next analysts day? What if you had the names and contact info for people engaging with your competitors but not you? Or detailed metrics for your share of voice versus your competition and what content gets the most social engagement for you and your competition (and by whom)?</p>
<p>Social makes much of this information available to anyone who wants to take the time to get it. Of course, there is also software that can do the job for you. <a href="http://www.HRmarketer.com" target="_blank">HRmarketer</a> is introducing a business and competitive intelligence suite in a few weeks that will provide much of this information. However you get it, get it. Having this information will remove the subjectivity of “influence” and bring a more accurate, scientific and disciplined approach to your content and social marketing. You can use these new metrics to measure the value of and grow your online brand — and the effectiveness of the people or agencies you’re hiring to grow your brand.</p>
<p>And those are “The Metrics” That Really Matter.</p>Do You Trust Your Recruiting Analytics?tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2014-01-30:502551:BlogPost:17853882014-01-30T18:30:00.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/sGeqV*sT8d1-KNLAPWU*bq6UTGDkgXMz2oMhXXbQ0-FqzaC44joEwRn8H9uQ6RnXywhi3V9aJqS0YyrSOZ9CwrEDwG5TZVUF/recruitinganalytics.jpeg" target="_self"><img class="align-left" src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/sGeqV*sT8d1-KNLAPWU*bq6UTGDkgXMz2oMhXXbQ0-FqzaC44joEwRn8H9uQ6RnXywhi3V9aJqS0YyrSOZ9CwrEDwG5TZVUF/recruitinganalytics.jpeg" width="263"></img></a> If you read one of my recent posts, <a href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2014/01/15/getting-started-with-recruitment-marketing/" target="_blank" title="Recruitment Marketing">“Getting Started with Recruitment Marketing”</a>, you’ll know my thoughts on the importance of analytics in a total recruitment…</p>
<p><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/sGeqV*sT8d1-KNLAPWU*bq6UTGDkgXMz2oMhXXbQ0-FqzaC44joEwRn8H9uQ6RnXywhi3V9aJqS0YyrSOZ9CwrEDwG5TZVUF/recruitinganalytics.jpeg" target="_self"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/sGeqV*sT8d1-KNLAPWU*bq6UTGDkgXMz2oMhXXbQ0-FqzaC44joEwRn8H9uQ6RnXywhi3V9aJqS0YyrSOZ9CwrEDwG5TZVUF/recruitinganalytics.jpeg" width="263" class="align-left"/></a>If you read one of my recent posts, <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2014/01/15/getting-started-with-recruitment-marketing/" target="_blank">“Getting Started with Recruitment Marketing”</a>, you’ll know my thoughts on the importance of analytics in a total recruitment marketing strategy.</p>
<p>And over the past few months, I’ve noticed something that I think is important to the <a title="Recruiting Analytics" href="http://smashfly.com/platform/analytics" target="_blank">recruiting analytics</a> topic. As an industry, much of our focus on analytics is on the output rather than the input when it comes to data. That’s something I’d like to explore today.</p>
<h2>Output vs. Input for Analytics</h2>
<p>Today, we are laser-focused on the ultimate deliverables (or output) that are provided in terms of data and the areas that we measure whether it’s time to fill, source of quality or cost per hire.</p>
<p>It makes sense, this is what you use to make strategic decisions and ultimately these metrics are used to evaluate your team’s performance. The result is practitioners, vendors and thought leaders talking about what you need to measure, the dashboards and systems used to provide this real-time data and benchmarking your overall success. And rightfully so, it’s integral to overall strategic improvement.</p>
<p>But in this topic, I don’t hear about the input a whole lot. And when I mention input, it’s around how you capture, store and provide access to the data you capture. While not as sexy as the ultimate deliverables, it’s this process that ensures the integrity of your data, enables you to identify simple &amp; complex relationships between data points and ultimately makes sure those outputs are available to key decision makers in real-time.</p>
<p>In short, it’s the “Garbage In, Garbage Out” philosophy. If your input process of how you capture and store the data is off, the data output on the back end can’t and shouldn’t be trusted in decision making.</p>
<p>So the question is how do we improve our data input?</p>
<h2>A Focus on Better Data Inputs</h2>
<p>When I talk about analytics the first thing I always fall back to is Trust. You need to ensure you have trust in the way data is captured, trust that all data is talking the same language and trust that your data process is scaleable as more data comes through the door. This is what data input is all about.</p>
<p>When capturing data you need a system and technology that you can trust to do all of the above while providing an easy and robust way to view the output of the data to be used in important decision making. When choosing technology, I recommend understanding how it fits with existing systems you use to capture data. I’d also look at limiting the amount of systems you use to capture your recruitment marketing data with one front-end platform being optimal.</p>
<p>When looking at your data capture and storage process, you can ask the following questions to better understand your data integrity:</p>
<p><strong>1. How many different systems are you using to capture recruitment data?</strong></p>
<p>Most organizations will have an ATS that helps them capture applicant to hire data (the accuracy of which can vary). But it’s on the pre-applicant side (where source, engagement and marketing data is captured) that organizations typically have multiple solutions focused on a single sliver of recruitment marketing (whether it’s <a title="Mobile Recruiting" href="http://smashfly.com/platform/toolset/mobile-recruiting" target="_blank">mobile</a>, social, job distribution, CRM, etc.) In these scenarios, the answers to the questions below are crucial.</p>
<p><strong>2. Is your data captured in the same manner based on the same criteria?</strong></p>
<p>Here’s a key issue especially when using multiple systems. If your data doesn’t talk the same language, it’s extremely difficult to make any sense of it much less compare it to one another. So we need to ensure that data from our marketing email campaigns, social recruiting efforts, mobile Career Site, etc. are all measured towards the same key criteria in the same way across all the solutions we use. That’s not to say that you don’t capture initiative specific data outside of that for certain initiatives (i.e. Google Analytics for <a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://smashfly.com/platform/toolset/career-marketing-sites" target="_blank">Career Site</a>). But just that the core data captured needs to be seamless with one another.</p>
<p><strong>3. Is your data being captured together?</strong></p>
<p>If you’ve answered the two questions above, you should have a process that uses a few key systems to capture all your data based a certain set of criteria that is the same across all initiatives. That’s a great start.</p>
<p>Now we need to make sure the data is stored in one location. This is integral if you are using multiple systems as you want data centrally available across all initiatives. You don’t want to have to manually combine data every time you want to get a Total view of your recruiting strategy. So a level of integration that gets all your clean data in one place is essential.</p>
<p><strong>4. Do users have full access to your data? In real-time?</strong></p>
<p>This is where input bridges the gap to output. We want to make sure your data is structured and stored in the way to give users full access to slice and dice the data as they see fit. And we want to make sure it’s available in real-time (not a month from now.)</p>
<p>If your data is clean and stored in a data warehouse, it’s just about how your platform provides you access to the data. This is where the glitz and glamour comes in through the form of pretty dashboards and reports. Any good system will make sure to provide you with real-time data in ready to consume reports that display key relationships that can help you make better decisions. It will also provide full access to the data to enable you and your team to make your own custom views of the data for further exploration.</p>
<h2>The Ying (Input) and Yang (Output) of Analytics</h2>
<p>The fact is both inputs and outputs are extremely important to better more strategic decision making in your <a title="Total Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> strategy. They are the Ying and Yang of analytics and need to be a key focus as you try to gain insight into your recruiting performance.</p>
<p>To sum it up, we need to ensure that how we capture and store our data is done correctly so we can have full trust in our data all while providing easy to use and powerful ways to consistently experience, interact and learn from this clean data.</p>
<p>In the end, that’s how we improve.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong><em>Check out my other blog posts at the <a href="http://blog.smashfly.com" target="_blank">SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Technology Blog</a>.</em></strong></p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/E19B9"/></p>7 Recruiting Metrics You Should Really Care Abouttag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-10-10:502551:BlogPost:17577002013-10-10T01:40:54.000ZPaul Slezakhttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/PaulSlezak
<p><strong><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/-f9aSIzg7-KaGT-pB9JN7Y2XpjQkufBUjz91Z-Hs*kNRmlbKgqptY69mNgHcm64gLXhF36re2JLi9m*l8rSGbSNUPqforW8R/metrics.jpg" target="_self"><img class="align-left" src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/-f9aSIzg7-KaGT-pB9JN7Y2XpjQkufBUjz91Z-Hs*kNRmlbKgqptY69mNgHcm64gLXhF36re2JLi9m*l8rSGbSNUPqforW8R/metrics.jpg" width="370"></img></a> Please note: This article originally featured on the <a href="http://recruitloop.com/blog/" target="_blank">RecruitLoop Blog</a>.</strong></p>
<p>If you measured every metric that every article on the web suggested you should measure to confirm whether you are employing effectively or not, you would end…</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/-f9aSIzg7-KaGT-pB9JN7Y2XpjQkufBUjz91Z-Hs*kNRmlbKgqptY69mNgHcm64gLXhF36re2JLi9m*l8rSGbSNUPqforW8R/metrics.jpg" target="_self"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/-f9aSIzg7-KaGT-pB9JN7Y2XpjQkufBUjz91Z-Hs*kNRmlbKgqptY69mNgHcm64gLXhF36re2JLi9m*l8rSGbSNUPqforW8R/metrics.jpg" width="370" class="align-left"/></a>Please note: This article originally featured on the <a href="http://recruitloop.com/blog/" target="_blank">RecruitLoop Blog</a>.</strong></p>
<p>If you measured every metric that every article on the web suggested you should measure to confirm whether you are employing effectively or not, you would end up spending most of your time measuring recruiting activities instead of actually recruiting!</p>
<p>While measuring your recruitment activities is certainly important, from my nearly two decades in the recruitment industry I can confidently tell you that there are really 7 metrics you <em>really</em> need to care about.</p>
<p>Keeping tabs on these metrics will ensure you are informed as to how your business is doing on the talent management front. I have also included some tips for how to simply and quickly implement these metrics within in your organisation, whether large or small.</p>
<h3><span>1. Time to Hire</span></h3>
<p>From the time you advertise your vacancy, how much time passes before the successful candidate starts? Not just before they accept your offer, but until they are actually on board?</p>
<p>Companies with strong talent management processes have faster hiring times than those without. Of course, the exception is any market that is short of suitably talented candidates; if you have strict hiring standards, it may take longer to find the appropriate person. Compare the time to hire across different roles and aim to lower the average as time goes on.</p>
<h3><span>2. Sourcing Channel</span></h3>
<p>It’s important to track where your candidates came from.</p>
<p>If you’re smart about your recruiting, you will have multiple channels from which to source your potential candidates – an advertisement on a job board; another one on LinkedIn; some direct contact with passive candidates; and a pool of potential employees connected to your careers pages either on Facebook or LinkedIn.</p>
<p>Every job vacancy needs to know:</p>
<ul>
<li>How many applicants came from each source;</li>
<li>How many <em>qualified</em> applications were garnered from each source;</li>
<li>Where the short listed applicants were sourced; and ultimately</li>
<li>Where the successful candidate first heard about the position.</li>
</ul>
<p>These metrics need to be kept in a database that can be cross-referenced over periods of time. Keeping tabs of this metric will save you money in the long run as it will highlight the effectiveness of your various channels.</p>
<p>If one channel is proving to be ineffective, you have justification to shut it down. Similarly, if one channel seems to be producing a higher than expected ratio of qualified candidates, you can focus more resources in that direction.</p>
<h3>3. Cost of Hire</h3>
<p>It’s a no brainer that the cost of every hire should be measured but have you considered <em>all</em> costs involved in a hire? Recruiter fees, whether internal or external, are straightforward. But what about the time it took the manager to interview? You should consider these factors when calculating the cost of hiring new employees:</p>
<ul>
<li>Advertisements placed (if they are billed directly to you);</li>
<li>Setting up and maintaining social media accounts like Facebook and LinkedIn;</li>
<li>Time your hiring managers spend interviewing potential employees;</li>
<li>Recruiter fees; and</li>
<li>Any accounting and administrative costs involved in setting up a new employee (eg contracts, pay accounts, health benefits etc)</li>
</ul>
<h3><span>4. Retention</span></h3>
<p>Now that you’re seeing the true extent of the costs involved in hiring a new employee, it’s important to look at your retention rates.</p>
<p>Thousands of dollars per year can be drained from your budget with low staff retention rates. The costs don’t just come from direct expenses associated with hiring a new person but also in the loss of productivity around the resignation, rehiring and retraining processes. Remember the cost of losing an employee can be as high as 3-4 times their salary.</p>
<p>Retention rates are best looked at from a cross-sectioned perspective. What is the turnover rate for a specific role? Compare that to the turnover rate across specific departments. Try checking the turnover rate by pay grade. i.e how many resignations vs terminations has each department / role / pay grade had?</p>
<p>A proper analysis of this metric should be performed every 3-6 months and graded across a period of time to show trends.</p>
<h3><span>5. Open Vacancies vs Positions Filled</span></h3>
<p>Larger organisations will need to keep track of the number of vacancies the organisation has vs the number of vacancies that have been filled recently.</p>
<p>This metric could be measured either per month or per quarter and the result should go alongside the ‘time to fill’ ratio. A company managing their talent acquisition will have a low amount of open vacancies when compared to positions filled.</p>
<h3><span>6. Offer : Acceptance Ratio</span></h3>
<p>It’s great to be in a position to make an offer to a rock star candidate. Unfortunately, if they then turn it down for something else, you are back to square one. This process costs you time and money, as well as morale, which is why this is such an important measure.</p>
<p>How many formal offers did you have to extend before you ultimately filled the role? This measure can go alongside your ‘cost of hire’ metrics.</p>
<h3><span>7. Gender Mix</span></h3>
<p>Many studies have shown the benefit of a mixed gender team, from greater innovation to greater profits.</p>
<p>Think about placing a metric within your dashboard that measures the percentage balance of men and women on your team in three levels; front line, middle management and senior positions.</p>
<p>From time to time it’s good to step back and assess the gender mix within teams and within the organisation as a whole.</p>
<h3><span>How to Implement These Metrics</span></h3>
<p>If you are working within a large organisation, the clear way forward for easy collation of this information is a customized software application that gathers data from as many sources as possible and automatically populates a dashboard with figures and timelines.</p>
<p>Consider providing mid level information for your hiring managers as well.</p>
<p>The information should relate specifically to one particular team or department and compare them to averages from the rest of the company so they are aware of their own talent management capabilities.</p>
<p>If customized software is not a possibility in your budget right now, a simple excel spreadsheet will do. Set up a regular interval to measure the metrics – eg every three months at a minimum – and request the information from your hiring managers at the appropriate time.</p>
<p>If you are a small operation, keeping tabs on these metrics as you go is the easiest way – updating the spreadsheet each time a hire is made and comparing each one to the previous ones.</p>
<p>When done right, metrics will save you time and money rather than sucking away precious resources into analysis.</p>The Career Site and ATS Job Applicationtag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-07-25:502551:BlogPost:17316502013-07-25T15:30:00.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p><em><a href="http://www.recruitingblogs.com/page/corporate-recruiting" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/qn5ZDC3BwWnwOnD8qdpbYc24ovhHOJzmotqJbxrfvwZ9x57Trtlbwmkb-NYxrbm3bULzuOyzHP3*UHYFLUe38bLaXZY56mOn/jobapplication.png" width="249"></img></a> This blog post is bred out of a lot of conversations I’ve been involved with in the past few months around the Career Site and the overall candidate flow into the ATS application. I hope it helps you think about how these two resources flow together and the difference between the two. Also feel free to check out our White Paper on Career Site Optimization,…</em></p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.recruitingblogs.com/page/corporate-recruiting" target="_blank"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/qn5ZDC3BwWnwOnD8qdpbYc24ovhHOJzmotqJbxrfvwZ9x57Trtlbwmkb-NYxrbm3bULzuOyzHP3*UHYFLUe38bLaXZY56mOn/jobapplication.png" width="249" class="align-right"/></a>This blog post is bred out of a lot of conversations I’ve been involved with in the past few months around the Career Site and the overall candidate flow into the ATS application. I hope it helps you think about how these two resources flow together and the difference between the two. Also feel free to check out our White Paper on Career Site Optimization, <a href="http://research.recruitingblogs.com" target="_blank">“Building a Better Career Site for the Future, Today”</a>.</em></p>
<p>When I talk about the ATS job application this is the process when a candidate clicks apply and is taken to create an account, upload their resume and fill out the full job application. This process is almost always controlled by the Applicant Tracking System (ATS). The information then flows into the ATS where an applicant record is created and used to manage the interview and hiring process.</p>
<p>The Career Site is your candidate facing front-end. It should provide compelling content (i.e. why work for us, unique benefits, landing pages, etc.), easy job search as well as search engine and mobile optimization. It’s main goal is to make it easy for candidates to find and engage with your jobs, sell candidates on applying and capture candidate contacts in the process flow. (<a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2012/07/10/the-future-of-corporate-career-sites2/" target="_blank">Check out this post from a year ago on areas to consider when building out your Career Site</a>.)</p>
<p>These two resources work in concert to provide a part of the overall candidate experience so it’s important to ensure the process is clear and seamless no matter how you implement each.</p>
<h2>Is the ATS Career Site the answer?</h2>
<p>When we look at Career Sites today, companies typically approach it from three main directions.</p>
<p>First, they create a main careers landing page (and potentially a few others) and then link the job search to the ATS job search technology. While this is low cost (you have already purchased your ATS to do other things), it leaves a lot to be desired from a candidate experience and optimization standpoint. Consider the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Typically in this scenario, the job search acts as a barrier to search engines ensuring that jobs are not indexed or have appropriate keywords.</li>
<li>Mobile is often hit or miss as well in terms of candidates being able to easily search and find jobs via mobile devices.</li>
<li>There is typically difficulty in adding new pages and content to the Career Site leaving your team with a solution that has limited potential for growth.</li>
</ul>
<p>Second, you have organizations that are building their own SEO and job search functionality with integration with the ATS. They have the development talent in-house to build and brand their own Career Site experience for candidates and have created a much better search and content oriented site for candidates. A few areas to consider here:</p>
<ul>
<li>You are investing a considerable amount the time and money in this project.</li>
<li>It’s upon your team to ensure that your Career Site can remain viable as new needs and trends arise.</li>
<li>As you are building out just the Career Site their will probably be an issue with tracking, not only about where candidates are coming to the Career Site from but also in passing source data to the ATS.</li>
</ul>
<p>Third, organizations leverage a recruitment marketing provider to help them build out, optimize and measure the performance of their <a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">Career Site</a>. Often this will ensure SEO and mobile optimization and provide integration for seamless integration with the ATS application process. It also provides for easy content and landing page creation with full job search support. This option is great for organizations looking to get more out of their Career Site and who don’t have the technical talent in house (or don’t want to have to stay alert for new trends.) Not all Career Site solutions are the same, however, so consider the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>The way they track and capture metrics and pass accurate data into the ATS. See <a href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2013/01/29/6-career-site-mistakes-you-may-be-doing-today/" target="_blank">“Tight Source Capture” on this blog</a>.</li>
<li>Degree of customization. How much can you “own” the design of the site and ensure full ownership over your employer brand.</li>
<li>Ease and cost of adding new content and landing pages. Is it easy to create and compelling content yourself or do you need your provider to lay it out and design it for you.</li>
<li>Some may also provide candidate capture during the job apply flow. This ensures that you capture candidate information even if they don’t finish the apply process (which in most cases is high).</li>
</ul>
<p>In every case above, you need to ensure that your Career Site job search passes to the appropriate application via your ATS. The flow should be</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Going Mobile</h2>
<p>We mentioned Mobile a little above but I wanted to talk about it a little more here. One of the biggest trends in applicant tracking is for the job application to be fully mobile enabled. This is a reaction not only to a younger workforce that lives off their phones but also different candidate populations where a smartphone is their primary means of accessing the web.</p>
<p>There are a number of solutions out there that provide Mobile Apply options but I encourage you first to talk to your ATS provider about their plans for a mobile application process. I know solutions such as Taleo already have mobile application options in place and I assume that most ATS either have a solution or have one on their product road-maps.</p>
<p>Now Mobile Apply is much different than Mobile Career Site. As we outline above, Mobile Career Site includes easy job search, mobile optimized content, SEO job pages as well as Talent Network job apply flow capture. It is the front-end of your candidate experience and is meant to educate and sell candidates on your employment opportunities while seamlessly flowing candidates to your mobile application process when they want to apply. Not having a mobile optimized Career Site can greatly limit the effectiveness of a Mobile application process. If candidates can’t find jobs via their mobile devices, they can’t apply for them, right?</p>
<h2>The Career Site and Application Strategy</h2>
<p>As you begin to really hammer out your candidate experience and recruiting process flow, it’s important to keep in mind how you are going to tackle your Career Site and application process and what technology you are going to use. Your ATS most definitely already provides support for your regular application process (and probably for mobile apply) but it may not be the best option for your Career Site and employer branding needs. Weigh the different options above and measure the results of your current process with <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a>. This will give you a better understanding of where you can improve and how new Career Site initiatives impact the performance of your recruitment campaigns.</p>
<p> </p>
<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="font-size-5"><strong><font style="font: 12.0px Helvetica;" face="Helvetica" size="3">Be sure to check out more recruitment articles at the <a href="http://blog.smashfly.com/">SmashFly Recruitment Blog</a> and engage with us on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/smashfly">@smashfly</a></font></strong></span></p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/o17pH"/></p>5 Recruitment Marketing Articles of the Week 6.29.13 to 7.12.13tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-07-12:502551:BlogPost:17238812013-07-12T14:30:00.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p><a href="http://www.recruitingblogs.com/page/corporate-recruiting" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/3vrxTCw6TBwjPzzFo6aYVftYjnowhaS2mdxmDY6MSGeH3hOGVsSn7L2CAxjhzo3STnrHjmhA1sQcnQAD*yEpb1HKb*R8D76r/MarketingReview2.jpg?width=250" width="250"></img></a> Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a>, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article you’ll be getting 2 weeks full of content and we’ll be talking about hot corporate recruiting trends, micro-videos, mobile candidate experience,…</p>
<p><a href="http://www.recruitingblogs.com/page/corporate-recruiting" target="_blank"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/3vrxTCw6TBwjPzzFo6aYVftYjnowhaS2mdxmDY6MSGeH3hOGVsSn7L2CAxjhzo3STnrHjmhA1sQcnQAD*yEpb1HKb*R8D76r/MarketingReview2.jpg?width=250" width="250" class="align-right"/></a>Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a>, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article you’ll be getting 2 weeks full of content and we’ll be talking about hot corporate recruiting trends, micro-videos, mobile candidate experience, Google + and mal-employment.</p>
<p>And before we get to the articles I urge you to check out <a href="http://thecynicalgirl.com/on-lists-and-ranking-in-human-resources/" target="_blank">Laurie Ruettimann’s collection of HR blogs</a> to help bolster your online reading list. Lots of great reads in there.</p>
<p>Now on to the articles. Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/07/04/the-9-hottest-trends-in-corporate-recruiting/?utm_source=buffer&amp;utm_campaign=Buffer&amp;utm_content=buffer0e33e&amp;utm_medium=twitter" target="_blank">The 9 Hottest Trends in Corporate Recruiting</a> by Josh Bersin (<a href="https://twitter.com/Josh_Bersin" target="_blank">@Josh_Bersin</a>)</p>
<p>Nice article by Josh that should help you think about where you should spend your recruitment marketing budget as you prepare for 2014.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ere.net/2013/07/08/a-wow-recruiting-opportunity-micro-videos-on-twitter-and-instagram/" target="_blank">A WOW Recruiting Opportunity – Micro-Videos on Twitter and Instagram</a> by Dr. John Sullivan (<a href="https://twitter.com/DrJohnSullivan" target="_blank">@DrJohnSullivan</a>)</p>
<p>Some really good tips on how you might be able to leverage micro video into your recruitment strategy with great benefit.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.ere.net/2013/07/10/the-mobile-candidate-experience-its-already-too-late/?utm_source=buffer&amp;utm_campaign=Buffer&amp;utm_content=buffereb567&amp;utm_medium=twitter" target="_blank">The Mobile Candidate Experience – It’s Already Too Late</a> by Larry Engel (<a href="https://twitter.com/LarryEngel" target="_blank">@LarryEngel</a>)</p>
<p>An interesting look at how Google is viewing SEO on mobile devices and the need to have <a title="Mobile Optimized Career Sites" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">mobile optimized Career sites</a> not only for candidate experience but for SEO benefit. This will continue to grow in importance.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://blog.sironaconsulting.com/sironasays/2013/07/how-to-use-google-plus-and-pinterest-for-recruiting-slides-smir13.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter" target="_blank">How to use Google Plus and Pintest for Recruiting [#SMIR13]</a> by Andy Headworth (<a href="https://twitter.com/AndyHeadworth" target="_blank">@AndyHeadworth</a>)</p>
<p>A worthwhile look at how to leverage these two new social media sites to better find and recruit qualified candidates. Great slide-share.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://chinagorman.com/2013/07/02/high-cost-of-mal-employment/" target="_blank">High Cost of Mal-Employment</a> by China Gorman (<a href="https://twitter.com/ChinaGorman" target="_blank">@ChinaGorman</a>)</p>
<p>Interesting look at current state of employment for recent grads and how this might impact the future generation of college attendees and job seekers.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Hope you enjoy the list and see you on Twitter <a title="SmashFly" href="http://twitter.com/smashfly" target="_blank">@smashfly</a>.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/w17ip"/></p>Candidate Experience: Why should we care?tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-07-10:502551:BlogPost:17232092013-07-10T15:30:00.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p><a href="http://www.recruitingblogs.com/page/corporate-recruiting" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/HP0qmwPthFW*Nkin3fX-fBLggBbtYLANunpbzIGvVhNBz17*xQ7huLOgEJ-iLGEn6bip8yx62sPFKTBME96DJpWqhJJEJUbi/whyshouldwecare.jpg?width=250" width="250"></img></a> If you are in the recruiting profession, it’s hard to get away from the <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank" title="Candidate Experience">candidate experience</a>. It’s one of those hot topics right now that everyone is talking about. You go to recruiting conferences and you here speakers talk about the importance of treating candidates better (i.e. “As…</p>
<p><a href="http://www.recruitingblogs.com/page/corporate-recruiting" target="_blank"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/HP0qmwPthFW*Nkin3fX-fBLggBbtYLANunpbzIGvVhNBz17*xQ7huLOgEJ-iLGEn6bip8yx62sPFKTBME96DJpWqhJJEJUbi/whyshouldwecare.jpg?width=250" width="250" class="align-right"/></a>If you are in the recruiting profession, it’s hard to get away from the <a title="Candidate Experience" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">candidate experience</a>. It’s one of those hot topics right now that everyone is talking about. You go to recruiting conferences and you here speakers talk about the importance of treating candidates better (i.e. “As an industry, we need to treat candidates like human beings instead of widgets.”) You have executives and members of your organization coming to you to talk about how we do this “new candidate experience” thing. And you have organizations such as the <a href="http://candidateexperienceawards.org" target="_blank">Candidate Experience Awards</a> to begin bench marking what a good candidate experience looks like by asking practitioners and candidates alike.</p>
<p>But the skeptic in me always asks the question, why should we care? Sure, we want to respond like humans to candidates but if I’m hiring quality talent does it really matter if I don’t get back to everyone that applies? Or that my employer branding stinks? Or that my job ads are boring? It is quite possible that you just <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxxajLWwzqY" target="_blank">don’t care</a>. Filling reqs is all that’s important and as long as you are doing that, bully with everything else.</p>
<p>The thing is as an industry I think that we do candidate experience a disservice with all the warm and fuzzies that we use when we describe candidate experience, what it looks like and what the value truly is. Getting back to all candidates in a timely fashion is great but what does that do for my organization. Enhancing my employer brand is great but give me some insight on how it helps do what we came here to do: recruit quality talent. Does improving the candidate experience help us increase applicant flow? Improve referral traffic? Fill jobs with our Talent Network? Recruit more passive candidates? Get more offers accepted when offered? Get more qualified candidates and hires?</p>
<p>I truly believe a better candidate experience will drive true business outcomes in your <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> strategy. There are some already doing this (check out last year’s Candidate Experience Awards winners with recognition: <a href="http://www.collegerecruiter.com/blog/2013/06/11/how-treating-candidates-as-clients-led-to-the-bozzuto-group-winning-a-candidate-experience-award/" target="_blank">Bozzuto</a>, <a href="http://www.collegerecruiter.com/blog/2013/06/20/how-open-and-honest-communication-led-to-case-mate-winning-a-candidate-experience-award/" target="_blank">Case-Mate</a>, <a href="http://www.collegerecruiter.com/blog/2013/06/25/how-a-positive-and-an-efficient-application-process-led-to-hyatt-winning-a-candidate-experience-award/" target="_blank">Hyatt</a>, <a href="http://www.collegerecruiter.com/blog/2013/06/26/how-emphasis-on-communication-with-job-seekers-led-to-business-technology-resource-group-inc-winning-a-candidate-experience-award/" target="_blank">BTRG</a>, <a href="http://www.collegerecruiter.com/blog/2013/06/26/how-communicating-with-candidates-led-to-blue-cross-blue-shield-of-michigan-winning-a-candidate-experience-award/" target="_blank">Blue-Cross Blue-Shield of Michigan</a>) and I urge you to do the same.</p>
<p>So the question is what should you be measuring and how should you be evaluating all the efforts you put on the candidate experience?</p>
<p>Well here’s a few reasons to care about the candidate experience and what you can be doing to make sure you are measuring them:</p>
<h2>Increased Applicant Flow</h2>
<p>With any candidate experience initiative, you have the tremendous opportunity to help bolster your current applicant flow. This is not only because the process is easier and more streamlined but also due to providing candidates with the information, expectations and options necessary to make an educated decision on whether to apply for a job. When we talk about candidate experience initiatives that can help increase applicant flow, here’s a few I can think of:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Applicant capture:</strong> Getting back to candidates is great. It provides them with a a response and let’s them move on with the job seeking process. But the question is what are you doing to keep in touch with them? Are you telling them they did not get the job and just ending the relationship? Or are you providing them options to remain engaged like a Talent Network or social recruiting profiles? It’s easy to forget candidates that aren’t ready for a position today actually go on with their careers after you interact. Having simple ways to remain in touch can help you keep top of mind while they get necessary experience and find a job that fits them.</li>
<li><strong>Talent Network opt-in:</strong> Whether it’s directly in the apply flow (<a href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2013/01/09/part-3-building-a-talent-network/" target="_blank">dual purpose job ads</a>), on your Career Site or through events and other channels, you need to provide the ability for candidates to opt-in to engage without needing to apply. Not every candidate is ready to apply today and you may not have a position open that fits their specific skill-set. However, provide them an opportunity to opt-in to engagement with you via email or SMS and/or through social media channels. This will then provide a free source of candidates to utilize for every future job that opens. Ping contacts in your Talent Network that a new job opens up (but only if it fits their skills and qualifications.) This is a free source to help you <em>improve applicant flow and in turn fill requisitions more quickly</em>.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Improved Quality</h2>
<p>This can go hand and hand with increased applicant flow in that the more candidates you receive for positions, the more selective you can be about selecting quality candidates. Also with this you will need to have a mechanism to measure this in your ATS beyond the applicant measure and back to the source that the candidate came in on (job board, Career Site, social network, etc.) However, in general, you will be able to know this intrinsically in the process. Filling jobs will be easier, you will be presenting more candidates to hiring managers and as part of it, you’ll be making harder decisions on who moves forward. When you think of candidate experience and it’s affect on quality here’s a few breakouts that you think about:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Measuring Quality:</strong> With this, it’s important to understand the sources you use that bring in the candidates that fit your organization. Every organizations determination of quality in different and you need to figure out the stages in your recruiting process that determine quality (i.e. is it when they get to the second interview? When they are screened by a recruiter? When they are part of the final selection process?) Then it’s all about ensuring your ATS and recruitment marketing technology is accurately capturing <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> on these candidates and tying them back to the source. If you are using <a href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2013/06/20/for-accurate-recruitment-metrics-dont-rely-on-candidate-self-selection/" target="_blank">candidate self-selection</a> you are not receiving the accurate metrics to measure quality of your strategy. With this information you can then improve your recruitment marketing mix by using sources that provide more qualified candidates and firing ones that don’t.</li>
<li><strong>Information Gathering:</strong> Through your Talent Network and ongoing relationship with candidates, you have the unique opportunity to gather more information and learn more about them. From interests to updated skills to their likes and dislikes. All this information can and should be used to identify those candidates that are good fits in the organization and can help you identify quality individuals and match them to the right jobs in your organization.</li>
<li><strong>Easier Apply:</strong> Now I’m not saying that you should make your apply process be a single step and just get their email but I will say that if it goes for more than 10-15 minutes, you are going to get a lot of people who drop off, even quality candidates. The key to the application is having the happy medium of understanding what information you need to make an educated decision on a candidate and what information you can capture later on after they apply. The easier the application, the less candidate drop-off you’ll receive but the key is lessening barriers while maintaining necessary information needed to do your job. By making becoming an applicant more accessible you should improve overall candidate quality.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Better Brand Awareness (Internally and Externally)</h2>
<p>A better overall candidate experience should lead to a better brand at your organization. This brand will help your bottom line value in terms of the two above: improved applicant flow and increased candidate quality. It should also help you in a few other areas as well, let’s take a look:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Employer Branding:</strong> With more compelling and informative content on your Career Site and through your other channels, you will be able to explicitly share your employer value proposition to candidates. With this, you should not only attract active job seekers but if convincing enough start interfacing with passive job seekers who are casually looking for new opportunities. The key is ensuring that your messaging and branding applies to both groups and truly highlights the uniqueness of working for your organization.</li>
<li><strong>More Referrals:</strong> Getting your employees involved in the recruiting process is integral to success. Referrals are a tremendous source for any recruiting organization but you really need to prove to employees that it’s worth their time and effort. First, ensuring that the application process is easy and straightforward is a huge benefit. You don’t want employees getting angry calls from their connections saying how bad the apply process is. Second, you need to have them be proud of the organization culture and be able to communicate the party line in terms of employer value. This second part goes directly into your messaging outwardly on the <a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">Career Site</a> and in your internal communications with these folks. The more resources and better tools you can provide employees the more referrals will be a significant source of your recruiting success.</li>
</ul>
<h2>They’re Your Customers</h2>
<p>This is the big one especially when you are communicating the need for a better candidate experience to senior level management (especially outside of HR.) Many of the candidates that apply to your jobs have some affiliation with you and in some cases are current customers and can be future ones. So the experience they have with your recruiting process whether good or bad will more than likely affect their perception of your organization as a whole. This can affect sales, word of mouth, social media sharing and other marketing and sales efforts from some of your favorite customers.</p>
<p>So when we look at it in this vein, how would you answer these questions:</p>
<ul>
<li>Should our application be 10 minutes or 30 minutes?</li>
<li>Should our messaging be aspirational or a set of job requirements?</li>
<li>Should our messaging be targeted or generic?</li>
<li>Should we use a SEO job search or ATS job search on the Career Site?</li>
<li>Should our job search and application be <a title="Mobile Recruiting" href="http://www.smashfly.com/MobileRecruiting.aspx" target="_blank">Mobile friendly</a>?</li>
<li>Should we send opt-in contacts just jobs or other content as well?</li>
<li>Should the jobs we send be targeted or be any new open job?</li>
<li>Should we get back to every candidate that applies for a position?</li>
<li>Should we provide candidates with the steps in the recruiting process or have them guess?</li>
<li>Should job ads just be needed qualifications or should it try to sell the position as well?</li>
<li>Should we spend money on making our experience better or spend it on a new job posting or other recruiting initiative?</li>
<li>Should we be measuring the sources we are using or use what we always use?</li>
</ul>
<p>There are also a number of other questions you can ask about the candidate experience but when you read those above it should become clear what you should be doing for most of those scenarios. But if you train your team to look at it this way, these decisions become much easier to make.</p>
<h2>Better Candidate Experience</h2>
<p>You don’t really know who a candidate is until they reach the interview phase but many organizations still act like pre-application is all a numbers game. We need to strive to ensure all qualified candidates can get in simply and smoothly without compromising our ability to make decisions on them overall.</p>
<p>Candidate Experience can provide real value to your recruiting organization, the key is to make it intrinsic to your recruiting team to make the right decisions when it comes to candidates. You want candidates to leave with a positive (or at least not negative) experience from applying to your organization because who knows, they might be a great candidate in the future or a great customer already.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Check out other posts on the Candidate Experience at the <a href="http://blog.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">SmashFly Recruitment Blog</a>.</strong></p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/i17hD"/></p>Defining the Candidate Experiencetag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-06-26:502551:BlogPost:17189942013-06-26T18:17:18.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p><em>If you are a recruiting organization and looking to improve your candidate experience, I urge you to apply for the <a href="http://www.thecandidateexperienceawards.org/how-to-apply/" target="_blank" title="Candidate Experience Awards">Candidate Experience Awards</a>. This will be a great way to learn new techniques and benchmark your candidate experience against the industry’s best.</em></p>
<p>It’s no secret that recruiting organizations are becoming more cognizant of the candidate…</p>
<p><em>If you are a recruiting organization and looking to improve your candidate experience, I urge you to apply for the <a title="Candidate Experience Awards" href="http://www.thecandidateexperienceawards.org/how-to-apply/" target="_blank">Candidate Experience Awards</a>. This will be a great way to learn new techniques and benchmark your candidate experience against the industry’s best.</em></p>
<p>It’s no secret that recruiting organizations are becoming more cognizant of the candidate experience and the effects a good (or bad) one can have on their organization and <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> efforts. However, when we speak about the candidate experience, in most cases, we focus on the application and interview process. While this is a big part of the equation, a true candidate experience has many more layers to be successful.</p>
<p>So for our purposes, I’ve crafted a definition. This is purely mine but I think brings the point across:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>The Candidate Experience is the collective result of ALL the interactions you have with candidates in the recruitment marketing and hiring process.</em></p>
<p>Simple enough. So when you look at this definition, there should be a few things that stand out.</p>
<p>First, it’s “ALL” the interactions that we have with candidates throughout the process. An interaction doesn’t have to be human to human but can be through messaging, communications or through 3rd party sources such as Glassdoor in addition to the needed and impactful human interactions.</p>
<p>Second, it’s both the recruitment marketing AND hiring process. The Candidate Experience starts with that first interaction a candidate has with your company no matter if it’s a job ad on a job board or meeting a recruiter at a Career Fair or visiting your Career Site. It starts way before they start to apply for a specific job.</p>
<p>Third, it’s collective. While you can have great messaging and an informative Career Site, if your application process stinks, candidates are going to leave with a bad experience. So you really need to focus on the candidate experience across your entire process.</p>
<h2>Where are Interactions Happening?</h2>
<p>Interactions with candidates happen in a variety of places and stages in the recruiting process. Here are a few of the most common places where you can improve your candidate experience:</p>
<p><strong>Job Attraction:</strong> This refers to all the places you utilize to attract candidates to your job openings. So when you think about this, it’s all about the messaging, branding and sources that you use to attract candidates. In many cases this is the first place that a candidate will interact with your company and even if they don’t apply for a job, you should be able to have them walk away with a feeling that they understand your organization and value of the opportunities you offer. You need to be able to measure and analyze this with <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a>.</p>
<p>A few questions to think about:</p>
<ul>
<li>Are we accurately measuring the effectiveness of our channels and messaging?</li>
<li>If so, what messaging is hitting home with candidates? What’s not?</li>
<li>Do we provide a way for candidates to engage with us without applying?</li>
<li>Are the sources we are using the right places for the candidates we are looking to attract?</li>
<li>Where are candidates dropping off during the process? What could be the cause?</li>
<li>If you are doing social recruiting, how responsive are you to candidates that interact with your channels?</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Targeted Engagement: </strong> With candidates that were already in your ATS (silver medalists?), join your Talent Network or are proactively sourced in your <a title="Recruitment CRM" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentCRMDatabase.aspx" target="_blank">CRM</a>, you are most likely engaging them with email and SMS. These communications can help separate you from other employers or put you in the dreaded spam folder if you are not too careful. The key is having timely and targeted communications when interacting with these precious recruiting contacts.</p>
<p>A few questions to think about:</p>
<ul>
<li>Do we currently have our talent contacts separated into relevant talent pipelines (by discipline, location, seniority, etc.)?</li>
<li>Are we sending generic emails with all job openings to everyone or sending targeted job opening emails to any relevant contacts?</li>
<li>Are we sending any non-job related emails to candidates? (Think company culture, videos, interesting blog articles, newsletters, etc.)</li>
<li>What messages are getting the best response rates? Most opt-outs?</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Research: </strong> Before candidates apply, they most likely will do research on your organization and what it’s like to work there. While they will do some of this on 3rd party sites that you can’t control, they will also go to your Career Site for information. Your Career Site represents your greatest defense against misinformation and can be a tremendous resource in selling the value proposition of your specific opportunities.</p>
<p>A few questions to think about:</p>
<ul>
<li>Is your <a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">Career Site</a> both SEO and Mobile friendly?</li>
<li>Do you have targeted content and landing pages directed at specific candidates? (Think Military, Engineers or specific campus recruiting.)</li>
<li>How easy is it for candidates to find relevant jobs? Is the job search integrated within the flow of your Career Site? (May not be the case if you rely on ATS job search.)</li>
<li>Do your Career Site metrics have tight source capture for candidates that go to the site via outside source and then decide to navigate the site?</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Apply Flow:</strong> One of the biggest complaints of candidates about applying is the application process. From the time it takes to submit an application to the supposed Black Hole of not hearing back on a submitted application. Some positive changes to your application process can go a long way to pleasing candidates.</p>
<p>A few questions to think about:</p>
<ul>
<li>How long is your application compared to other organizations?</li>
<li>What is the minimum amount of information we would need to make a interview decision on a candidate? (You can always capture more information after they apply.)</li>
<li>Do you capture feedback from candidates that just completed the process? Is it automated?</li>
<li>If candidates have trouble with the application process, how can they reach out to you?</li>
<li>Do you send a confirmation to candidates that you received their application?</li>
<li>Do you get back to every candidate with the final status of their application?</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Interview Process:</strong> Once a candidate enters the interview stage the need to follow up gets even more crucial. Interest has been expressed on both sides and even if they aren’t hired, you want them to have positive things to say. Here the candidate experience is affect by hiring manager interactions, feedback, follow-up and setting a clear picture of the interview process.</p>
<p>A few questions to think about:</p>
<ul>
<li>How clearly do you state the steps and time horizon of the interview process to candidates? Is there a central location where this is laid out (maybe on your Career Site.)?</li>
<li>Do you “close the loop” on every interaction a candidate makes with your organization (i.e. next steps after an interview, final decision, etc.)?</li>
<li>Are your hiring managers and recruiters on the same page for candidate interviews and what they are looking for?</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Employee Engagement:</strong> This is the one area that can help to affect the 3rd party channels that ultimately affect candidate perceptions. Having a good on-boarding process, working environment and company culture will get candidates talking about your company and submitting referrals. You should encourage employees to share their thoughts on what it’s like to work at your organization (hopefully they have had a good experience.)</p>
<p>A few questions to think about:</p>
<ul>
<li>How involved do we get current employees in talent acquisition?</li>
<li>What are your current scores on sites like Glassdoor? Why are they good or bad?</li>
<li>How can we work with HR to better prepare hires for success at the organization?</li>
</ul>
<h2>Go improve It</h2>
<p>So there’s my definition and a look at the different areas that can affect a candidate’s overall experience. I hope this gives you some ideas on some small ways that you can improve your candidate experience. The key is consistently look to improve it and use data to see what works in doing so. As I’ve said before, the Candidate Experience is not a one time effort but a consistent one with incremental changes that lead to a better experience overall.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/J17dz"/></p>5 Recruitment Marketing Articles of the Week 6.15.13 to 6.21.13tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-06-21:502551:BlogPost:17174002013-06-21T15:29:51.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a>, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article, we’ll be talking about software feelings, engaging tomorrow’s workforce, employment branding, A/B testing, sourcing and semantic SEO.</p>
<p>Also, a reminder. The Candidate Experience Awards are accepting applications for this year’s awards…</p>
<p>Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a>, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article, we’ll be talking about software feelings, engaging tomorrow’s workforce, employment branding, A/B testing, sourcing and semantic SEO.</p>
<p>Also, a reminder. The Candidate Experience Awards are accepting applications for this year’s awards and is a great way to benchmark your candidate experience against some of the industry’s best recruiting organizations. To get further details on how to participate as a recruiting organization, please see the <a title="Candidate Experience" href="http://www.thecandidateexperienceawards.org/how-to-apply/?utm_source=buffer&amp;utm_medium=twitter&amp;utm_campaign=Buffer:+@smashfly+on+twitter&amp;buffer_share=371f3" target="_blank">“How to Apply?” page on the website</a>.</p>
<p>Now on to the articles. Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.knowledgeinfusion.com/blog/2013/06/before-saying-your-software-sucks/?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter" target="_blank">Before saying your software sucks look around…feelings</a> by Jason Averbook (<a href="https://twitter.com/JasonAverbook" target="_blank">@JasonAverbook</a>)</p>
<p>Jason has some great points on software, it’s fit in your strategy and why it usually takes the brunt of the blame. Yeah, some software does suck but he’s not talking about those.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghanbiro/2013/06/15/smart-leaders-engage-tomorrows-workforce/" target="_blank">Smart Leaders Engage Tomorrow’s Workforce</a> by Meghan Biro (<a href="https://twitter.com/MeghanMBiro" target="_blank">@MeghanMBiro</a>)</p>
<p>Really good post by Meghan on the need to understand the difference needs of Millennials and how when it gets right down to it all generations want the same from their jobs and careers.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://amplifytalent.com/2013/06/20/npr-employment-brand/?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter" target="_blank">This is NPR Recruiting: An Employment Branding Case Study</a> by Lars Schmidt (<a href="https://twitter.com/ThisIsLars" target="_blank">@ThisIsLars</a>)</p>
<p>Lars presentation is well worth a look for insights on employer branding and social recruiting. However, please note his message at the bottom. These strategies worked well for NPR and their unique environment. Make sure to learn and take aspects of what they do that will work in your unique recruiting strategy.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.pinstripetalent.com/recruitalicious/bid/149177/A-B-Testing-Simple-yet-Effective-Way-to-Engage-in-Continuous-Improvement?utm_source=Kevin+W.+Grossman&amp;utm_medium=twitter&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Recruitalicious+%28Pinstripe+%7C+Recruitalicious%29" target="_blank">A/B Testing: Simple yet Effective Way To Engage in Continuous Improvement</a> by Carolyn Humpherson</p>
<p>Carolyn provides a great primer on using A/B Testing to help you improve your recruiting process especially with your messaging. We’ve had clients use <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> to test job titles to great success, so it does work.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.sourcecon.com/news/tag/source-the-web/" target="_blank">Source the Web</a> by SourceCon (<a href="https://twitter.com/SourceCon" target="_blank">@SourceCon</a>)</p>
<p>Here is a collection of articles on using different websites to source qualified candidates from including Quora, Twitter, Facebook, Google +, GitHub and others. Very useful.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.webmarketingdude.com/2013/05/semantic-seo.html" target="_blank">Bonus: Semantic SEO</a> by Luis Galarza</p>
<p>Lots of great content explaining Semantic Search and how we can help Search Engine Optimization on our sites and webpages with this evolution of search.</p>
<p>Hope you enjoy the list and see you on Twitter <a title="SmashFly" href="http://twitter.com/smashfly" target="_blank">@smashfly</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/H17PT"/></p>For accurate recruitment metrics, don’t rely on Candidate Self Selectiontag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-06-20:502551:BlogPost:17167752013-06-20T18:36:50.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>One of the most common themes of the HCI Strategic Talent Acquisition Conference last week (<a href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2013/06/19/learnings-from-the-hci-strategic-talent-acquisition-conference/" target="_blank">you can see my recap here</a>) was the need for <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank" title="Recruitment Metrics">recruitment metrics</a> as part of any recruitment strategy. Capturing data on your talent acquisition process is integral for…</p>
<p>One of the most common themes of the HCI Strategic Talent Acquisition Conference last week (<a href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2013/06/19/learnings-from-the-hci-strategic-talent-acquisition-conference/" target="_blank">you can see my recap here</a>) was the need for <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> as part of any recruitment strategy. Capturing data on your talent acquisition process is integral for a variety of reasons, here are the most common I heard last week:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Smarter Decisions:</strong> Actionable knowledge from the data enables you to make smarter decisions on where to use your limited recruiting budget (as you know what’s working and not working.)</li>
<li><strong>Tell a better TA Story:</strong> Senior level management speaks in numbers and the better you can have data to back-up decisions and tell the talent acquisition story, the more they will listen.</li>
<li><strong>Identify Critical Roles:</strong> Use the data to understand and identify the critical roles that require more effort and work to find qualified talent. This helps the recruiting team determine where they should spend their time and where they should be proactively building relationships prior to a job opening.</li>
</ul>
<p>I think any recruiting professional would agree that metrics would help them do a better job and is a focus for their organization. They want the data to make these smarter decisions, improve time and resource allocation and better communicate talent acquisition’s value to the business.</p>
<p>The thing is, however, in talking with many organizations, they are still relying on outdated methods to capture data on where candidates are coming from. With the dreaded candidate self-selection being at the top of the list.</p>
<h2>Why is Candidate Self-Selection Bad?</h2>
<p>For those that do not know, candidate self-selection is the moment during the application process that the candidate is asked “How did you hear about this Job opportunity?”. The candidate then selects from a drop-down list that includes their Career Site, Referral and other sources. This source is then passed into the ATS for reporting properties.</p>
<p>There are several problems with this:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Limited Accuracy:</strong> At this part of the application, the candidate is less caring about reporting the correct source and more focused on submitting the right resume and references. And it’s been reported that 80% of candidates select the wrong source when asked.</li>
<li><strong>Playing the Game:</strong> A candidate may select something because they think it will help their application being selected for an interview. Most common answer in this regard is “Referral”.</li>
<li><strong>One Source:</strong> Candidates can only select one source and that means that you only can track one source in your system. The fact is candidates will often interact with multiple sources prior to applying and you need a flexible solution to capture this. If you are interested in tracking this, <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/ContactUs.aspx" target="_blank">let us know</a>.</li>
<li><strong>Candidate Confusion:</strong> Also with tracking just one source, a candidate may not understand which one to choose. Do they chose the job board they found the job on or the Career Site where the job board directed them right before the application?</li>
<li><strong>Not Every Source: </strong> In many cases, not all sources where candidates can find jobs are accounted for in the choices. This greatly limits a candidate’s ability to input the right source even if they want to.</li>
</ul>
<p>When using candidate self-selection for your source tracking you are condemning your source data to be inaccurate. And this can severely limit your ability to make educated and smarter decisions on the sources you use to attract candidates. Most importantly, this leads to sticking with the status quo in terms of your recruitment marketing mix ensuring you are not able to get more out of your recruiting budget and the sources you use.</p>
<h2>Steps to ensuring Accuracy of your Source Data</h2>
<p>So I hope at this point you understand the need to ensure the source data that is flowing into your ATS is accurate. The next obvious question is how do we do this? If you are interested, here’s what I suggest:</p>
<p>1. Talk with your ATS provider.</p>
<div style="margin-left: 2em"><ul>
<li>Most prominent ATS solutions provide the ability to do source code tracking. This ensures that the correct source automatically gets passed into the system for candidates that apply without candidate involvement.</li>
<li>The way it works is that you create sources in your ATS and then can append the given specific source codes at the end of the specific job URL. For any job posted with the source code, the ATS will not ask for candidate self selection in the application process but will instead apply the source based on the incoming source code in the URL.</li>
<li>Your ATS account manager should know how to do this and can explain this process to you.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p>2. Talk to your Job Distribution provider</p>
<div style="margin-left: 2em"><ul>
<li>Many organizations use job posting solutions in coordination with their ATS to distribute their job ads to the various job boards and other recruiting channels they use to attract candidates to apply. This helps them save the time and effort required to manually post all these jobs to the various channels so their recruiters can focus on screening and finding qualified talent.</li>
<li>You also use this type of solution for the metrics. Job posting providers can help capture important recruitment funnel metrics including views, apply clicks, contacts and applicants so you can better understand your drop-off rates and how effective your messaging is.</li>
<li>Most important for this conversation, job posting solutions can also ensure accurate data is entering the ATS by automatically appending the correct ATS source codes to each posting. This will ensure good data is entering the ATS so that the reports you create have accurate source data. It also eliminates human error and the need for your recruiters to remember to add the correct source code to every new job post.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p>No matter if you add the ATS source code manually to your job ads or via a <a title="Global Job Distribution" href="http://www.smashfly.com/GlobalJobPosting.aspx" target="_blank">job distribution</a> solution, it’s important to make this a part of your process as the source data you pull from your ATS cannot be trusted unless you ensure the accuracy of it.</p>
<h2>Accurate Data leads to Smarter Decisions</h2>
<p>In order to get more strategic with your <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> strategy, it’s important to have accurate actionable data. This means ensuring that the data coming into your systems is correct and that all the initiatives you utilize for recruiting are measured for performance. As an industry, we need to begin doing things not because it’s what we’ve always done but because it works in attracting qualified candidates.</p>
<p>And this all starts by ensuring we have the most accurate data possible.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/j17Nr"/></p>What is a comprehensive recruitment strategy?tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-05-22:502551:BlogPost:17046502013-05-22T14:07:18.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>On this blog and in our conversations with recruiting organizations, we talk a lot about having a “comprehensive recruitment strategy”. But in some of the conversations I have with folks, it’s not really clear what this means.</p>
<p>So let’s aim to clear this up!</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>It’s not just one thing</h2>
<p>Now in the marketplace today, there are a number of voices locking into a few areas and stressing their importance. “You need to be doing Mobile”, “A CRM is a must”, “Social needs…</p>
<p>On this blog and in our conversations with recruiting organizations, we talk a lot about having a “comprehensive recruitment strategy”. But in some of the conversations I have with folks, it’s not really clear what this means.</p>
<p>So let’s aim to clear this up!</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>It’s not just one thing</h2>
<p>Now in the marketplace today, there are a number of voices locking into a few areas and stressing their importance. “You need to be doing Mobile”, “A CRM is a must”, “Social needs to be part of your strategy”. And while I agree on some of these thoughts (I’ll get to mobile and social in another post), it’s really not about one of these things in particular but creating and leveraging all of recruiting tools to improve and max out the return of your strategy.</p>
<p>A comprehensive recruitment strategy enables you to make use of all these destinations and tools to create a unique process that helps you attract more qualified candidates to your organization through the collective power of having them together. I use the word unique here because every organization will utilize the different pieces above in different ways and varying frequencies. And you can only find the best mix for your organization by having <em>complete visibility</em> into everything you do from a recruitment perspective and how it helps you attract qualified candidates.</p>
<p>Now let’s look at all the options you have today to find qualified talent.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Harnessing the Recruiting Chaos</h2>
<p>Remember the good old days of posting your jobs on a few job boards, getting all the candidates you need and hiring the best one.</p>
<p>Well, the recruiting world has changed a lot since then. While job boards are still a part of the puzzle, we’ve seen an amazing influx of other channels and activities that can help to attract the right candidates to your organization. Recruiting destinations and tools such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Major Job Boards</li>
<li>Niche Job Sites</li>
<li>Career Networks</li>
<li>Universal Tracking</li>
<li>Mobile (across the strategy)</li>
<li>Social (across the strategy)</li>
<li>Resume Databases</li>
<li>CRM</li>
<li>Web Sourcing</li>
<li><a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">Career Site Optimization</a> (Mobile / SEO)</li>
<li>Talent Networks / Communities</li>
<li>Career Fairs / Events</li>
<li>Email &amp; SMS Engagement</li>
<li>Referrals</li>
<li>Candidate Experience</li>
<li>Employer Branding</li>
</ul>
<p>No recruiting organization can complain about the lack of options. But how can we leverage all of these solutions and understand which ones fit best in our unique strategy.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>A Comprehensive solution for a Comprehensive strategy</h2>
<p>The major problem today is that leveraging and experimenting with all these options usually means the organization has to purchase and use multiple point solutions. This leads to a number of problems with integration, budget, vendor management, recruiter transparency and most importantly disjointed <a title="Recruitment Analytics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics / analytics</a>.</p>
<p>And while these solutions may be good at the narrow area that they focus on, in order to have a truly comprehensive recruitment strategy, you need a solution that is just as comprehensive as your strategy.</p>
<p>That’s where solutions like <a title="Recruitment Marketing Platform" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMarketingPlatform.aspx" target="_blank">Recruitment Marketing Platform</a> come in. These solutions integrate all the solutions you use to attract and source candidates to your employment opportunities. This enables you to execute, manage and measure your entire strategy from a centralized location. Improving your recruitment return and process while providing full visibility into the activities that work in your recruiting strategy and ones that don’t.</p>
<p>Let’s go into this last point a little deeper.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>What does full visibility mean?</h2>
<p>We use full visibility a lot in our conversations with recruiting organizations and I wanted to take the time to explain what we mean by that.</p>
<p>The end goal of any successful recruiting strategy is the ability to gain insight and have actionable knowledge that can help improve your overall strategy and produce better future results. Through every job requisition filled an organization should in theory become more intelligent about their process and understand what really drives performance becoming better with every iteration.</p>
<p>That’s where we want to be from a recruiting strategy perspective but let’s take a step back and see how we actually accomplish this. Actionable knowledge does not come from a silo or from thin air but only comes from having accurate comprehensive data available to those that need to analyze it. To go deeper, actionable knowledge is achieved not just by capturing the data in some form or fashion but moreso by ensuring that that the data is together in a format that allows for easy analysis.</p>
<p>And that’s where visibility comes in.</p>
<p>Visibility is not about the end goal intelligence per se but it’s about ensuring you have all the right metrics and data needed in a central place so that you can work towards that intelligence and actionable knowledge. Without the visibility, the conversation of continuous intelligence and actionable knowledge is a moot point (as you are working off of inaccurate, disjointed and/or incomplete data.)</p>
<p>When we talk about visibility in your recruitment strategy, we are really talking about measuring everything you do across similar performance metrics and data. It means capturing this data for every job that you fill and measuring the performance of all your channels and sourcing activities in terms of the qualified candidates they are driving to apply for your organization.</p>
<p>It’s with this that a centralized and comprehensive Platform is needed. A Recruitment Marketing Platform will help to capture this data centrally to enable the analysis across all your recruitment activities. The key here is making this data available in the aggregate across all jobs while also enabling your organization to drill down into the data based on certain factors and criteria.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Getting there</h2>
<p>In order to remain competitive with the best candidates, organizations need to think differently about their recruitment strategy. That means diversifying the ways that they market, attract, educate and engage with candidates and consistently improving how the integrate all these sources and activities into a comprehensive strategy.</p>
<p>This type of strategy doesn’t happen without the right base from a technology standpoint. It’s possible to do this by custom integrating various point solutions, however, this option provides little flexibility and growth in the future. The other and better option is to look for a solution that is comprehensive enough to not only manage all these channels but measure and report on them centrally.</p>
<p>Once you have this complete visibility, it’s just a matter of time before you have the intelligence and insight needed to improve your strategy and attract more qualified candidates than ever before. That’s the goal and it starts with thinking broader than what you are doing today.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/h179L"/></p>Where does innovation come from in recruitment?tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-05-15:502551:BlogPost:17025462013-05-15T14:38:15.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>With the <a href="http://recruitinginnovationsummit.com/2013/" target="_blank">Recruiting Innovation Summit</a> this week in San Francisco, I thought it was as good a time to discuss innovation in our space and discuss how and why it comes about.</p>
<p><em>I’m not down there but our CEO Mike Hennessy &amp; <a href="https://twitter.com/smashflyscott" target="_blank" title="Scott Fowle">CSO Scott Fowle</a> are, if you want to get your SmashFly fix.</em></p>
<p>So let’s get…</p>
<p>With the <a href="http://recruitinginnovationsummit.com/2013/" target="_blank">Recruiting Innovation Summit</a> this week in San Francisco, I thought it was as good a time to discuss innovation in our space and discuss how and why it comes about.</p>
<p><em>I’m not down there but our CEO Mike Hennessy &amp; <a title="Scott Fowle" href="https://twitter.com/smashflyscott" target="_blank">CSO Scott Fowle</a> are, if you want to get your SmashFly fix.</em></p>
<p>So let’s get started:</p>
<h2>Identifying and Solving a problem</h2>
<p>Innovation is almost always born out of the necessity to solve a key problem that the industry faces on a consistent basis. The problem can be for a variety of reasons and crops up due to a number of different factors. But in every case it solves a business need to can provide clear bottom line growth.</p>
<p>The life-span of an innovation can vary as well and in today’s environment this life-span is shrinking. The innovations that have the most legs are ones that are less functional (unless it’s truly can’t be copied) and more strategic in nature. It’s not about the technology per se but about how the technology ties into how you think about and execute your strategy. It’s these innovations that provide the most value and ones that are the hardest to part with once you get them ingrained in your organization.</p>
<p>The recruiting industry has had their fare share of innovations in the last decade. Here we will take a look at some of the key innovations and how they came to be:</p>
<h2>Like this but Better</h2>
<p>The first innovation type is one you are familiar with. It takes an older but current concept and applies it to a new medium. We saw this all the time with the internet revolution. And the most important one for recruiting was job boards.</p>
<p>Job Boards are seen as pretty passe at this point (although the right mix still holds tremendous value to recruiters) but back in the day, they were what kicked off the sourcing revolution we see today. And it just happened off the idea of taking newspaper classifieds and moving them to the online space. It was an easy sell. It was cheaper to do, anyone online could find your job ad and apply and you gained valuable metrics that you could tie back to the job board in terms of applicants.</p>
<p>Companies that jumped on this job board wave early saw more applicants than they had ever saw before and we able to in turn fill jobs more quickly with better people.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Addressing a need quickly</h2>
<p>All innovations address a problem that people need solved, however, in some cases their is a need so huge that companies jump in to fill it as soon as possible. <em>Many companies will probably say they are this but I’m not too sure at times.</em></p>
<p>With the rise of Job boards and the increased mass of candidates applying for their jobs, organizations didn’t know how to handle the volume and ensure candidates moved smoothly through the hiring process. Enter the Applicant Tracking System. With a focus on creating processes where their were none before the ATS helped organizations manage their jobs and more importantly their applicants through a standardized process.</p>
<p>The ATS has evolved toward HRMS systems since that time but the real reason every large organization has an ATS is because they need a system to manage their job application flow and just as important, remain compliant in their hiring process.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Adapting Technologies from other disciplines</h2>
<p>I’ve heard people say that HR / Recruiting is at least 10 years behind their Marketing and Sales brethren in terms of technology and strategy. And while I consider this unfair, there is a little truth in there. While there might be a gap, it is a gap that is closing by the day.</p>
<p>You can see it today in the point solutions that are cropping up that are based off of marketing and sales technologies. From <a title="Recruitment CRM" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentCRMDatabase.aspx" target="_blank">Recruitment CRM</a> to source, manage and engage with potential candidates to SEO platforms designed to help candidates find your jobs to social recruiting tools to leverage social media in candidate attraction (especially with referrals), there are a number of technologies looking to adapt what works for other disciplines and make it available for recruiters to leverage and improve their strategies.</p>
<h2>Familiar but new way of thinking</h2>
<p>The last innovation is one that comes about through a new way of thinking. It’s familiar in terms of what it brings but it provides a “Duh” moment when communicated. This is because while you’ve never thought of it in the way described, it makes such perfect sense you don’t know how you have not thought about it before.</p>
<p>You’ve seen this in HR for ERP solutions and Talent Management Suites. They brought together disparate point solutions and made them into an integrated solution to manage all of your HR technology needs. Today, you are seeing it with <a title="Recruitment Marketing Platform" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMarketingPlatform.aspx" target="_blank">Recruitment Marketing Platforms</a>. RMP’s are pushing the point recruitment solutions together to provide a way for organizations to manage ALL of their recruitment tools and campaigns from a centralized solution. You should be familiar with all of these. Think Job Distribution, Recruitment CRM, SEO Career Sites, Talent Networks /Communities, Mobile, Social, all integrated.</p>
<p>The value comes from not only being able to have your recruiting team manage everything centrally through one vendor but in providing you full visibility and <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> into the sources and activities that actually provide value (and which don’t) to your organization in terms of qualified candidates and hires. Add in the unique integrated use cases (that only come with having all these tools together) that enable you to capture, attract and engage with more qualified candidates and you have an idea and innovation that’s worth pursuing.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Where to next?</h2>
<p>Innovation in recruiting is nothing new and companies will continue to find new and unique ways to provide value and enrich the lives of recruiters. The key is to really look at new technologies and trends that are being talked about in the marketplace and figure out if they are innovations that will last to provide value for your <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> organization over the long haul. The indications are out there, it’s just about identifying them!</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em><strong>Have thoughts on this, connect with me on Twitter <a href="http://twitter.com/smashfly" target="_blank">@smashfly</a>!</strong></em></p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/o172t"/></p>Is your boss "cool" or "cruel"...Let us evaluate the signstag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-05-07:502551:BlogPost:16996952013-05-07T14:52:28.000ZMark A. Leonhttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/MarkALeon
<p>I am fortunate to have a warm and receptive boss that cares about my future and goes above and beyond to provide me with the tools and resources to gain the necessary skills to grow and work in a very satisfying environment.</p>
<p>With her cheerleader persona, focus on rewards and recognition and balanced workflow, she is a role model for the qualities that we look for in a “cool” boss. On a daily basis, I witness a leader that:</p>
<ul>
<li>Fosters innovation</li>
<li>Promotes strong…</li>
</ul>
<p>I am fortunate to have a warm and receptive boss that cares about my future and goes above and beyond to provide me with the tools and resources to gain the necessary skills to grow and work in a very satisfying environment.</p>
<p>With her cheerleader persona, focus on rewards and recognition and balanced workflow, she is a role model for the qualities that we look for in a “cool” boss. On a daily basis, I witness a leader that:</p>
<ul>
<li>Fosters innovation</li>
<li>Promotes strong positive behavior</li>
<li>Engages a teaming environment</li>
<li>Provides her staff with opportunities to promote leadership through project management initiatives</li>
<li>Shares in best practices and process improvement</li>
<li>Promotes strong performance through a series of monetary and non-monetary rewards</li>
<li>Acknowledges individual and group successes to the team and leadership</li>
<li>Has trust to allow the team to work independently and not micro manage responsibility and results</li>
<li>A proponent for growth and development</li>
<li>Supports your causes if you have researched them and believe in them</li>
<li>Provides the tools and resources to succeed</li>
<li>Sets measurable and challenging goals</li>
<li>Believes in the success of the team each and every day</li>
</ul>
<p>There you have it, the attributes of a “cool” boss.</p>
<p><a href="http://recruiterpoet.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/boss1.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-6365" alt="boss1" src="http://recruiterpoet.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/boss1.jpg?w=250&amp;h=250" width="250" height="250"/></a></p>
<p>“Cool” bosses win championships, lead successful companies, mentor the future leaders of the world and at the end of the day are incredible mothers, fathers, children, siblings, friends, volunteers and advocates for good.</p>
<p>All to often, at some point in our career we fall under the jurisdiction of the “cruel” boss. There are many reasons we are supervised by individuals with negative energy that inhibit growth and change. </p>
<p>First, we should identify the signs of a “cruel” boss:</p>
<ul>
<li><span>Aggressive and negative in behavior and communications</span></li>
<li>Takes credit for the work of their subordinates</li>
<li>Does not promote or reward positive behavior and results</li>
<li>Micro manages work flow, output and daily responsibilities</li>
<li>Does not provide resources, tools or budget to promote efficient and productive output</li>
<li>Focused only on oneself and not the betterment of the team</li>
<li>Wedges barriers between team engagement</li>
<li>Finger points and pins colleague against colleague</li>
<li>Not supportive of the team goals</li>
</ul>
<p>Many factors go into negative personality attributes affiliated with a “cruel” boss. Some are affected by their personal life, feelings of rejection being passed up on a promotion, a history of bullying or overbearing behavior or a perception that you need to be hard and aggressive to move up the corporate ladder.</p>
<p>Studies have been done on backgrounds, behaviors, genders and even height on the types of people that are promoted and make the most income. Some fields of study argue the tough and aggressive approach while others engage the collaborative and supportive approach.</p>
<p>Either way, more people spend time in the office environment than in their home and personal lives. From the time we are 18-22 until we turn 65 to 70, we will be spending most of our adult lives working. This is a statement that really needs to sink in. A negative work environment breeds stress, health issues and an overall negative environment. It can lead to such unhealthy behaviors as drinking, smoking or violence. This negativity will translate to the family live, personal life and interaction with strangers.</p>
<p><a href="http://recruiterpoet.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/boss2.jpg"><img src="http://recruiterpoet.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/boss2.jpg?w=250&amp;h=250" alt="boss2" width="250" height="250" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-6367"/></a></p>
<p>It is critical that leaders with people management abilities understand their roles and develop an approach that is positive, productive, engaging and fun. Here is how:</p>
<ul>
<li><span>Learn about your team. Understand their strengths and weaknesses and partner up skills. Understand their personalities and determine how they can co-exist in a cordial manner.</span></li>
<li>Spend time understanding their future goals and aspirations. Set up measurable projects, action items and training that will get them where they want to go.</li>
<li>Promote and reward strong productive performance. Winners win and others will follow.</li>
<li>Be fair but be supportive of their efforts even if there is a risk.</li>
<li>Let them be. These are professionals, no matter what industry and trusting them is a big sign of support.</li>
<li>Let them become the professional they want to be. Guide them, but let them breathe.</li>
<li>If comfortable, learn about their lives outside of work. We are in a social engagement/networking world now. Personal and professional lives are starting to become one.</li>
</ul>
<p>There we have it.</p>
<p>There are “cool” bosses and “cruel” bosses. The entertainment industry has taken a comical look at “cruel” bosses in film with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/">Office Space</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1499658/?ref_=sr_1">Horrible Bosses</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114594/">Swimming with Sharks</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458352/?ref_=sr_1">The Devil Wears Prada</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/?ref_=sr_1">Glengarry Glen Ross</a>, but this should not be the stance we take in the work force.</p>
<p>A productive team is always better than a productive person. The collective sharing of ideas, innovations and expertise will lead us forward in the business world. We need leaders that understand, support and foster a positive work environment.</p>
<p>Do you have a “cool” boss or a “cruel” boss?</p>
<p>Full link:</p>
<p><a href="http://recruiterpoet.com/2013/05/01/is-your-boss-cool-or-cruel-let-us-evaluate-the-signs/">http://recruiterpoet.com/2013/05/01/is-your-boss-cool-or-cruel-let-us-evaluate-the-signs/</a></p>Recruiting Insights from this year’s Cinderella Florida Gulf Coasttag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-03-27:502551:BlogPost:16814022013-03-27T15:55:29.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>If you are like me, this year’s March Madness has led to a lot of busted brackets and little hope of winning any of my bracket pools. But with all the upsets, have come some great teams and stories especially among the Cinderellas. With one of the best stories being Florida Gulf Coast.</p>
<p>From the coach and his supermodel wife to the players that barely played before the new regime to the university that was often confused with a Junior college, this team has been media gold and one of…</p>
<p>If you are like me, this year’s March Madness has led to a lot of busted brackets and little hope of winning any of my bracket pools. But with all the upsets, have come some great teams and stories especially among the Cinderellas. With one of the best stories being Florida Gulf Coast.</p>
<p>From the coach and his supermodel wife to the players that barely played before the new regime to the university that was often confused with a Junior college, this team has been media gold and one of the most popular teams. And this historic run (farthest a 15 seed has ever gone) should be a recruiting boost for the institution to be used to attract better players that want to play in a warm climate for a now famous coach. This story will be used in every recruiting trip and be spread by anyone close to the program and for good reason. Players are just like job candidates. They want to be part of something special and want to be shown it.</p>
<p>In looking at this situation, I think there’s a lot we can learn about how we market our opportunities to candidates. Here are some other recruiting insights that we can learn from Florida Gulf Coast:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Building off Success:</strong> This is just one of the <a href="http://www.sbnation.com/college-basketball/2013/3/25/4144724/florida-gulf-coast-ncaa-tournament-2013-guide" target="_blank">many posts about the university</a> and has been a windfall for the university who’ve seen increased money and admissions since. The team is very likeable and this is something that they will continue to build off of. A few months from now after this story has died down, we’re going to hear a lot less about this team. However, that doesn’t mean the school and program need to stop talking about it.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">They should be creating campaigns around this and work hard to repeat it next year. Take a look at VCU, the biggest cinderella from 2 years ago. Shaka Smart and the Rams have taken their initial success and transformed the program into one of the NCAA’s most consistent programs.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>The Insight:</em> The lesson here is to not rest on your laurels but instead continue to market and communicate your accomplishments to attract better talent and drive the business forward. Use past accomplishments to attract quality candidates that will lead to future accomplishments. And track how these messages are being received with <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a>.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Culture: </strong> One of the most endearing aspects of FGC is their team culture. During and after games and in the locker room, they just seem like a lot of fun. With their chicken dancing, post game celebrations and overall joyful style of play, it is probably their best recruiting tool.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">The players they are trying to recruit want to be part of a team that is like this. And will continue to be something they talk about to this population.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>The Insight:</em> If your company culture is unique and fits what the candidates you are trying to attract are looking for, you need to play it up. Use it on your <a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">Career Site</a>, in your marketing campaigns, as you talk with candidates and during the interview process.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Understanding Needs and Development: </strong> When Andy Enfield came to Florida Gulf Coast, <a href="http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/tournament/2013/story/_/id/9099314/2013-ncaa-tournament-andy-enfield-rise-florida-gulf-coast" target="_blank">he understood that they needed new players and system to be successful</a>. While he knew he wouldn’t be able to recruit his players initially, he decided that he needed players that he could coach up to the level of skill that he was looking for.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>The Insight:</em> Just as important as recruiting the right players for your organization is understanding upside / growth as well as having the resources internally to train and develop your people. Very few candidates will come in fully ready to contribute at a high level at your organization and you need to be able to turn C and B players into the A players you need to be successful.</p>
<p>As you build your organization and <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> strategy it’s important to keep in mind the candidates you are trying to recruit and the messaging you are using to attract them. Building a winning team can be tough and takes effort and insight in order to accomplish. I guess we’ll see next year if Florida Gulf Coast can build upon their recent success.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/V16d5"/></p>5 Best Recruitment Marketing Articles of the Week 3.16.13 to 3.22.13tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-03-22:502551:BlogPost:16794152013-03-22T14:08:20.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a>, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article, we’ll be talking about the Source of Hire, outlawing HR, recruiters and refs, the value of sourcing and talent acquisition value mapping.</p>
<p>Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order),…</p>
<p>Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a>, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article, we’ll be talking about the Source of Hire, outlawing HR, recruiters and refs, the value of sourcing and talent acquisition value mapping.</p>
<p>Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a title="Source of Hire" href="http://www.ere.net/2013/03/22/source-of-hire-report-referrals-career-sites-job-boards-dominate/" target="_blank">Source of Hire Report: Referrals, Career Sites, Job Boards Dominate</a> by Lance Haun (<a href="https://twitter.com/thelance" target="_blank">@thelance</a>)</p>
<p>As always, there is some interesting data in this year’s CareerXRoads Source of Hire report (def agree with Lance’s proviso at the beginning). Definitely worth a look to see what’s working for other organizations. However, also make sure you are capturing these types of <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> for your organization internally.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.hrexaminer.com/what-if-hr-was-outlawed/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HRExaminer+%28HR+Examiner+with+John+Sumser%29" target="_blank">What if HR was Outlawed?</a> by Jason Lauritsen (<a href="https://twitter.com/JasonLauritsen" target="_blank">@JasonLauritsen</a>)</p>
<p>Interesting mental exercise from Jason with some great insights into the activities and value HR brings to the organization.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://fistfuloftalent.com/2013/03/recruiters-and-refs.html" target="_blank">Recruiters and Refs</a> by William Tincup (<a href="https://twitter.com/williamtincup" target="_blank">@williamtincup</a>)</p>
<p>Nice article on the similarities of recruiters and referees and how mistakes happen in both professions if you are trying to do your job well.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.sourcecon.com/news/2013/03/19/8090/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sourcecon+%28SourceCon+News%29" target="_blank">Beyond the Numbers: Demonstrating the Full Value of Sourcing (Part 1)</a> by Jeri Risin (<a href="https://twitter.com/jeriar" target="_blank">@Jeriar</a>)</p>
<p>Jeri starts to outline her perception of value for sourcing and how it doesn’t lie fully in counting numbers. I’m excited to see Part II in a few weeks.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.ere.net/2013/03/22/mapping-the-value-of-talent-acquisition/#more-31156" target="_blank">Mapping the Value of Talent Acquisition</a> by Jillyan French-Vitet (<a href="https://twitter.com/JillyanFrench" target="_blank">@JillyanFrench</a>)</p>
<p>Interesting discussion of determining and mapping the value of the talent acquisition function to the core business. Jillyan does a great defining and explaining the process.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Hope you enjoy the list. If you have any articles I should add to the list feel free to add them to the comments or follow us on Twitter <a href="http://www.twitter.com/smashfly" target="_blank">@smashfly</a>.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/O16Mx"/></p>Will Work For Klouttag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-03-15:502551:BlogPost:16765072013-03-15T23:50:41.000ZLeslie Masonhttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/leslie12002
<p><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/E12ZO5fIjR1IFEVl6oVqlV3BFxh5j*NxyCtgtTb2FOBmYfptwf--os-SCna-CV8utitd0zB05mB-T7j1bIJNDxZ9k*56ZbYD/WillWorkforKlout3.jpg" target="_self"><img class="align-full" src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/E12ZO5fIjR1IFEVl6oVqlV3BFxh5j*NxyCtgtTb2FOBmYfptwf--os-SCna-CV8utitd0zB05mB-T7j1bIJNDxZ9k*56ZbYD/WillWorkforKlout3.jpg" width="478"></img></a></p>
<p></p>
<p>This picture of me was snapped recently at a local mall and it’s for realz! Can you believe it? Me, Leslie Mason, reduced to soliciting social media scores on the street corner. Am I the only person who measures their social success by their Klout score and what in the world is going…</p>
<p><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/E12ZO5fIjR1IFEVl6oVqlV3BFxh5j*NxyCtgtTb2FOBmYfptwf--os-SCna-CV8utitd0zB05mB-T7j1bIJNDxZ9k*56ZbYD/WillWorkforKlout3.jpg" target="_self"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/E12ZO5fIjR1IFEVl6oVqlV3BFxh5j*NxyCtgtTb2FOBmYfptwf--os-SCna-CV8utitd0zB05mB-T7j1bIJNDxZ9k*56ZbYD/WillWorkforKlout3.jpg" width="478" class="align-full"/></a></p>
<p></p>
<p>This picture of me was snapped recently at a local mall and it’s for realz! Can you believe it? Me, Leslie Mason, reduced to soliciting social media scores on the street corner. Am I the only person who measures their social success by their Klout score and what in the world is going on???</p>
<p>My Klout score is dropping and I am concerned, not panicked yet but on the verge. After all I worked really hard to get it up to 63 at its peak and three weeks ago it dropped below 59. Thankfully it recovered but just today when I checked it was back at 59, causing a sinking feeling in my stomach as well as a bit of dizziness. Monitoring my Klout score has been a roller coaster ride for me over the past few months and I can’t figure out what is driving this behavior. </p>
<p>I have carefully maintained all my social networks, judiciously sharing content and engaging with others and trying to spread out my interaction over all the sites that Klout monitors; LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Blogger, Instagram, Foursquare and Wordpress. What am I doing wrong? Recruiters rely on their social media brand. It is an indicator of our success, right? I need to figure out Klout’s secret sauce… is it weighted heavier for sharing original content? Most of the Klout heavyweights are publications or blogs. Maybe I’m on to something! </p>
<p>My company, <a href="http://www.intuit.com/">Intuit</a>, uses a methodology we call <a href="http://twitter.com/LeanStartIN">Lean StartIN</a> which is <a href="http://network.intuit.com/2012/09/12/how-to-bring-a-startup-to-life/lean-startin-july2012/">a process of rapid experimentation</a>. We are applying it across the enterprise, including Talent Acquisition. For my purposes, I want to test the impact of one blog posting on my Klout score over a period of time to see if this will move the needle… hopefully increasing my score. I will monitor results and report back to you. </p>
<p>If the experiment is a success my Klout score will hit 65 (an all time high) and if it reaches 70 I will share a video of me dancing a jig like Michael Flatly, the Lord of the Dance (I am Irish after all). Or better yet… I will do the <a href="http://www.policymic.com/articles/26683/youtube-harlem-shake-video-watch-the-13-best-harlem-shake-versions">Harlem Shake</a> or celebrate <b><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/officialpsy">GANGNAM STYLE</a></b>… in fact I’ll post a poll and let YOU vote to decide which artistic celebration of dance you prefer. This would actually count as another Lean StartIN experiment… look out, I’m on a roll!</p>
<p>For this experiment I will need your help, Dear Reader. My ask of you is to please tweet, retweet, share, post, comment, like, +1 and utilize any other method of social sharing of my article to spread the word. I’m also calling in the Big Guns… feeling a comeback!</p>
<p><b>Friends and Coworkers:</b></p>
<p><i style="font-size: 13px;">You know who you are, but like the academy awards I only have limited space to call out names. Forgive me for those that have been omitted. </i></p>
<p>@StacyZapar friend and social rockstar… I’m happy to ride on your Klout coat tails anytime. ;)</p>
<p>@ghouston @aaroneden @LeanStartIN @JorgenSundberg @StephenMonaco @adriandparker @BillVick @ray_anne @smheadhunter @nmailey @crizzcoxx @scottaxel @fishdogs @philohme @Mike_Anas @SherYoung @LindaBurkard @PHXRecruit @keli-intuit @KMGoodall @mint @Intuit @QuickBooks @turbotax @IntuitInc @IntuitPayroll @IntuitAccts @GoPayment @IntuitCareers </p>
<p>Please… hook a sister up!!!</p>
<p><b style="font-size: 13px;">Shameless Self Promotion (really cry for help):</b></p>
<p>@Mashable @TechCrunch @twitter @LinkedIn @YouTube @Facebook @hootsuite @Google @instagram @Forbes @HuffingtonPost @GuyKawasaki @scobleizer @dannysullivan and all you other Captains of Klout out there… you have my permission to share and repost my content. </p>
<p><i> </i><b style="font-size: 13px;"><i>And last but certainly not least:</i></b></p>
<p>@StephenAtHome Award winning twitter celebrity superstar that you are… I’d be thrilled just to see @leslie12002 show up in your timeline</p>
<p>Hmmm… wonder if @Klout would use this article in their blog? Stay tuned for part deux… hope to see you on my timeline!</p>
<p>@leslie12002</p>
<p><a href="https://plus.google.com/114527969442901187111/posts"></a></p>5 Best Recruitment Marketing Articles of the Week 3.9.13 to 3.15.13tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-03-15:502551:BlogPost:16762592013-03-15T18:00:00.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a>, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article, we’ll be talking about the Pope, measurement, finding content, LinkedIn and hiring for fit.</p>
<p>Also, here is…</p>
<p>Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a>, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article, we’ll be talking about the Pope, measurement, finding content, LinkedIn and hiring for fit.</p>
<p>Also, here is <a href="http://hrexaminer.com/5-links-women-and-work/?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HRExaminer+%28HR+Examiner+with+John+Sumser%29" target="_blank">John Sumser’s list of 5 Links</a> since he usually gets it out before me.</p>
<p>Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.knowledgeinfusion.com/blog/2013/03/papal-talent-management/?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter" target="_blank">Papal Talent Management</a> by Jim Viscanti (<a href="https://twitter.com/jviscanti" target="_blank">@jviscanti</a>)</p>
<p>Timely post with some great thoughts and ideas on how to think about and form your talent strategy.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://blog.sironaconsulting.com/sironasays/2013/03/how-recruiters-can-find-great-content-to-share-on-social-media-with-ux-ui-example.html" target="_blank">How recruiters can find great content to share on social media (with UX / UI example)</a> by Andy Headworth (<a href="https://twitter.com/AndyHeadworth" target="_blank">@AndyHeadworth</a>)</p>
<p>Great piece by Andy on what you should be doing to find content to make a great social recruiting feed that is valuable to candidates.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://hrexaminer.com/measurement/?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HRExaminer+%28HR+Examiner+with+John+Sumser%29" target="_blank">Measurement</a> by John Sumser (<a href="https://twitter.com/JohnSumser" target="_blank">@JohnSumser</a>)</p>
<p>Nice take on how we measure the new talent landscape and what it takes to be committed to having a measurement culture.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://booleanblackbelt.com/2013/03/is-linkedin-locking-down-public-profiles-or-just-having-problems/?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BooleanBlackBelt+%28Boolean+Black+Belt%29#.UUNWOxn1cUU" target="_blank">Is LinkedIn Locking Down Public Profiles or Just Having Problems?</a> by Glen Cathey (<a href="https://twitter.com/GlenCathey" target="_blank">@glencathey</a>)</p>
<p><a href="http://booleanstrings.com/2013/03/14/where-is-waldo-on-linkedin/" target="_blank">Where is Waldo on LinkedIn?</a> by Irina Shamaeva (<a href="https://twitter.com/braingain" target="_blank">@braingain</a>)</p>
<p>Here are two articles talking about some changes to LinkedIn that you need to be aware of from a sourcing perspective.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://steveboese.squarespace.com/journal/2013/3/13/more-on-the-danger-of-hiring-for-fit.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter" target="_blank">More on the Danger of Hiring for “Fit”</a> by Steve Boese (<a href="https://twitter.com/SteveBoese" target="_blank">@steveboese</a>)</p>
<p>Nice companion piece to his earlier article, Steve goes into why fit shouldn’t necessarily be the only goal in your recruiting strategy.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Hope you enjoy the list. If you have any articles I should add to the list feel free to add them to the comments or follow us on Twitter <a href="http://www.twitter.com/smashfly" target="_blank">@smashfly</a>.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/T16A3"/></p>5 Myths about Recruitment Marketingtag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-03-13:502551:BlogPost:16747702013-03-13T14:24:16.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>Within any organization there are a number of things that you take for granted as being true in your process and strategy. Things that in thought may not appear to be a big deal but given a second look may have a considerable impact on your overall results. And in many cases, this is not done with intent but happens because you expect your technology and process to accurately handle these areas. The real problem is that some organizations don’t even realize they have a problem.</p>
<p>To…</p>
<p>Within any organization there are a number of things that you take for granted as being true in your process and strategy. Things that in thought may not appear to be a big deal but given a second look may have a considerable impact on your overall results. And in many cases, this is not done with intent but happens because you expect your technology and process to accurately handle these areas. The real problem is that some organizations don’t even realize they have a problem.</p>
<p>To help you identify potential problems in your strategy, here are some common myths that I’ve seen that are interesting to look at and address in your organization:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>ATS Data is Accurate: </strong> Depending on your ATS and your job distribution technology, this may be a big problem or not an issue of at all. The key here is to not assume that the source data entering your ATS is accurate. Many ATS provide the option to create unique source codes for the recruitment sources you use so that you can ensure accurate data entering your ATS. Any good <a title="Global Job Distribution" href="http://www.smashfly.com/GlobalJobPosting.aspx" target="_blank">job distribution</a> technology will make it easy to automatically insert the right source codes into every posting out to job boards, social networks and other niche sites.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">The other key is to make sure that you aren’t using candidate self-selection to get your data. This typically is wholly inaccurate as the candidate really does not really care if your source data is accurate and will select the source (probably referral) that they think gives them the best chance for an interview. A shock I know.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Sources are to blame:</strong> If you are like most organizations, you are using a variety of recruitment sources including job boards, niche site and social networks to spread awareness and attract applicants to newly open jobs. For some jobs, if the number of applicants is disappointing, we point the blame to the sources we use. But in many cases this may be wrong.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">As I wrote in my blog post last week, there are a number of factors that affect the success of a job campaign and it’s not just the sources used. Your messaging, apply process, <a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">Career Site</a> and other factors all have an impact on low applicant and qualified candidate rates.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Your Career Site is your best source: </strong> This is probably one of the biggest cases where your <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> are misleading. While your Career Site is how a large number of candidates interact with your employment opportunities, it may be deceivingly high. Let’s look at an example to explain this.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Say a candidate goes to a job board and clicks through to apply for the job. They get to the job page on your Career Site but decide the job itself is not a good fit. They use the search to find other potential jobs to apply for, click through some jobs and ultimately apply for another job. For this example, a lot of processes the source for this candidate will be the Career Site even though the job board is the source that ultimately got the candidate to start the process.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">The key is to understand how sources are passed into your Career Site and how the Career Site passes these sources into your ATS.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Past applicants are not qualified:</strong> For every job position you fill, there are a good deal of candidates that are not selected to work at your company. This does not mean however that they are not qualified and may not be fits for other or future positions. But in a number of cases, these candidates are lost, dismissed and forgotten once the job they applied for is filled. This however can be a mistake in the strategy and process.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">The key here is having ways to engage with candidates that don’t become hires especially your Silver medalists. This can include adding them to your Talent Network, inviting them to join a Talent Community or following your social channels. In all these cases, we are concentrating on engaging with these folks and keeping them warm until an opportunity that fits their skill-set becomes available. Content and messaging is key during this time and needs to be targeted and focused for the different audiences you are trying to attract.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Drop-off candidates don’t matter: </strong> Within your apply process today, a large number of candidates are dropping off before they finish their application. This number can be as high as 50-60% depending on the company and job position and this represents a big opportunity cost of not capturing information on these candidates. Companies that put a simple Talent Network opt-in form in their apply process are able to capture nearly 80% of the candidates that typically drop-off.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Many times when presenting this information, one of the most common soud-bytes I’ve heard is “we don’t need more applicants, we already get too many.” While this is something to think about, I think this is a flawed way to think about your process. Not all candidates are created equal and we should be trying to capture information on all the candidates that interact with our careers. If too many applicants is a problem, we can and should look at better ways to screen and segment the candidates that are coming into our ATS, whether that’s requesting more information from candidates or using our technology better to identify high potential candidates.</p>
<p>With your <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> strategy and process, it’s important to take a step back every now and then and evaluate the metrics to identify how to improve your process and results. And I encourage you to keep these 5 myths in mind next time you take a look.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/t166p"/></p>What affects the success of a job ad?tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-03-07:502551:BlogPost:16719852013-03-07T18:30:00.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>This will be a short post but one that I think is important to understand as you are evaluating your process and budget <a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/0qkw8Ea4ZK4nMxMmjyFect66qBP0huuwZhJSltEiWh8tHqJDzeAhAH4lNfV4*LYp4ISw*s6a5yF4g0rC7*MRpAFOFTH0BIui/successgraphic.jpg" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/0qkw8Ea4ZK4nMxMmjyFect66qBP0huuwZhJSltEiWh8tHqJDzeAhAH4lNfV4*LYp4ISw*s6a5yF4g0rC7*MRpAFOFTH0BIui/successgraphic.jpg?width=250" width="250"></img></a> spend. For every one of your recruiting advertising sources, you are making educated decisions based on the…</p>
<p>This will be a short post but one that I think is important to understand as you are evaluating your process and budget <a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/0qkw8Ea4ZK4nMxMmjyFect66qBP0huuwZhJSltEiWh8tHqJDzeAhAH4lNfV4*LYp4ISw*s6a5yF4g0rC7*MRpAFOFTH0BIui/successgraphic.jpg" target="_self"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/0qkw8Ea4ZK4nMxMmjyFect66qBP0huuwZhJSltEiWh8tHqJDzeAhAH4lNfV4*LYp4ISw*s6a5yF4g0rC7*MRpAFOFTH0BIui/successgraphic.jpg?width=250" width="250" class="align-right"/></a> spend. For every one of your recruiting advertising sources, you are making educated decisions based on the <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> you capture on all the job boards, social networks, niche sites and other distribution sources you use.</p>
<p>However, metrics like views, apply clicks, contacts and applicants can give a great broad idea of how well different sources perform but they will also be affected by a number of underlying factors that will affect the overall performance. It’s important to keep this in mind while analyzing your data.</p>
<p>Let’s look at some of the factors that may affect the performance of specific job ads in your process. All of the following will have some affect on the performance of a job ad:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Where it’s posted: </strong> First and foremost, the <a title="Global Job Distribution" href="http://www.smashfly.com/GlobalJobPosting.aspx" target="_blank">job distribution</a> sources you use will have a great effect on performance. And in this case, you will want to try to match up the right sources (job boards, niche sites, social networks, etc.) that provide the best match with the audience you are trying to attract. The key here is to make sure you are consistent in the job ad text you use on all these channels so there is no outside factor that affects conversion rates in the candidate attraction process.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Job Ad Messaging:</strong> This probably has more of an effect than most organizations realize but the length and quality of your job advertisement will more than likely impact a candidate conversion from them viewing the job ad and deciding to enter the application process. In many cases, this will be a source independent factor and affect your overall apply click rates on the aggregate.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">To test the impact of job ad messaging overall, you can do A-B testing for a specific job. Keep the same job title but post two different job descriptions. Track the % of candidates that move from views to apply clicks. This will help you understand and improve your messaging for future job advertisements. <a title="Job Ad Messaging" href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2011/05/12/3-ways-to-improve-conversion-in-your-recruitment-marketing-funnel/" target="_blank">Here are some things you might want to try in improving your job ads</a>.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Expectation Match: </strong> One thing that might be happening if you are getting lower than expected performance from job postings is that your job title might not match the candidate’s expectation of the requirements, seniority and/or job responsibilities for the position. If you are seeing a big drop-off, it might be helpful to take a look at your job titles vs. the job titles for your competitors for similar positions. This can help you better match your titles to what candidates are really looking for and expecting for that type of position.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Application Process:</strong> Your applicant rates will be affected by the length and complexity of the application process. In general, there will be a give and take for organizations to create a process that gathers enough information on a candidate to do an initial screening decision and have it be short enough for a candidate to actually spend the time to finish the process. If getting enough applicants is a big problem for you, this is one of the key areas I would focus on.</p>
<p>We talk a lot about measuring the quality of the sources you use in your <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> strategy. However, please keep in mind it’s also important to understand the other factors that will effect your conversion rates that are source independent. In aggregate your overall conversion rates from one step in the recruitment funnel to another can give real insight into where you can improve your process and convert more candidates into applicants.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/t15yl"/></p>Why are Source(s) of Influence and Candidate Touchpoints important?tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-03-05:502551:BlogPost:16709852013-03-05T15:43:29.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>As an industry, we are making huge strides in the way we measure and evaluate our recruitment marketing strategies. While efficiency metrics like time to fill and cost per hire are still part of the evaluation process, quality metrics that are tracking where organizations are finding their most qualified candidates and hires are becoming integral to strategic decision making.</p>
<p>However, even with these metrics there is room for growth. Over the past few years, there’s a push to move…</p>
<p>As an industry, we are making huge strides in the way we measure and evaluate our recruitment marketing strategies. While efficiency metrics like time to fill and cost per hire are still part of the evaluation process, quality metrics that are tracking where organizations are finding their most qualified candidates and hires are becoming integral to strategic decision making.</p>
<p>However, even with these metrics there is room for growth. Over the past few years, there’s a push to move past these static single source <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> and move towards understanding all the sources and factors that influence a candidate to apply. What I call “Sources of Influence”.</p>
<p>I’ve written a lot on the topic and you can read more deeply on the concept <a title="Source of Influence Metrics" href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2012/07/17/how-many-touchpoints-do-you-need-before-a-candidate-applies/" target="_blank">here</a> and <a title="Candidate Touchpoints" href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2011/10/11/source-of-hire-candidate-touchpoints/" target="_blank">here</a> but here it is in a nutshell.</p>
<p>When a candidate applies, it is more than likely they’ve had multiple interactions with your organization. In many cases, measuring a single source of hire (which more accurately is source of application) while helpful is overly simplistic and gives less insight into all the initiatives that influence a candidate to apply. Being able to measure a candidates interactions from the source of application to social recruiting interactions to <a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">Career Site</a> pages viewed to communications with the recruiting team to the Google keywords they used to find your jobs to the email campaigns they interacted with in your <a title="Talent Network" href="http://www.smashfly.com/TalentNetwork.aspx" target="_blank">Talent Network</a>, there’s a number of data points that we can capture to give a better idea of all the initiatives that we spend time on that have a positive affect on a candidate’s decision to apply.</p>
<p>The technology and capacity to measure these interactions accurately doesn’t exist completely in the marketplace today. It’s getting there and I expect there to huge strides in this within the next year. The real question, however, is how would you use this new data effectively in your process and what value it would hold in understand candidate motivations better.</p>
<h2>Understanding and Creating Candidate Buyer Profiles</h2>
<p>For sales and marketing, we are constantly trying to understand the motivations and actions of the people that buy and don’t buy our products and services. We record their interactions with our brand, social profiles, website, sales process, etc. to see how we can better engage and convert in our marketing and sales process.</p>
<p>Recruiting is very similar in this regard. We need to be able to understand what drives the best candidates to apply for our job positions. From the recruitment sources that are most successful to the content that we create on the <a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">Career Site</a> to the messaging used in Talent Network email campaigns, we need to be able to track these interactions back to every candidate. This will help us better identify the actions and sources that provide the most value in our <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> strategy.</p>
<p>So say we are able to capture and analyze the source of influence data on a candidate? What then? Well, first I think we need to identify what we determine to be qualified and split these candidates from the rest of the group and look at the results for all past jobs. While it can be beneficial in the aggregate, you may also want to break up the data by job category and different candidate populations as well.</p>
<p>In looking through the data, you’ll get a better idea of how candidates initially came across your brand, whether that’s a job ad, through Google search, directly through the website or sourced by your recruiting team. This can give you a good idea on the quality of source. Second, you’ll start to form an idea on the interactions it takes for candidates to take action to apply for a job. In most instances, it may be a quick turnaround where they come across a job and immediately apply. But in others it may be a longer time period of relationship building through engagement via content, email or social channels.</p>
<p>The key here is to get some clarity on how your best candidates are finding and converting in your process, what messaging they interact with and the overall life-cycle before these candidates apply. All so you can hopefully duplicate this success for future recruitment campaigns.</p>
<h2>Better Target Current Candidates</h2>
<p>While a lot of the value of capturing source of influence lies in retroactive analysis, source of influence should also help you determine fit in real time.</p>
<p>Once you understand better how you are attracting quality candidates, it’s time to use this info to better identify these candidates in your process. Say you find that candidates that read your blog or engage with your email newsletter are typically more informed, have more interest in your jobs and are more likely to accept job offers if presented. Within your recruitment technology, you should be able to filter and sort candidates that fit this criteria within your initial search. This data can be very useful in coordination with the keywords you use to filter resumes for qualified candidates as well as the screening calls done by your recruiting team.</p>
<p>Candidate behaviors in this regard will help you identify interest and the level of engagement from candidates. This can help you find qualified candidates that are more excited about the prospect of working for your organization that are more likely to become hires if made an offer.</p>
<h2>Another Data Point in making better decisions</h2>
<p>Source of Influence data will provide more insight into the candidates you are trying to attract. Used in concert with key screening and filtering information through the process can provide a way to identify individuals that are qualified and have a serious interest in your organization. In addition, it can help you determine the initiatives and campaigns you use in your strategy that have a real impact in getting qualified candidates to apply, give you a better idea of the overall candidate life-cycle and help you better understand the messaging and engagement that really matters to your best candidates.</p>
<p><em><strong>Have thoughts on this concept? Share below or ping me on Twitter <a title="SmashFly Technologies" href="http://twitter.com/smashfly" target="_blank">@smashfly</a>!</strong></em></p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/f15vX"/></p>Is the focus on Time to Fill hurting candidate quality?tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-02-01:502551:BlogPost:16586762013-02-01T16:00:00.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>We've had a lot of conversations with recruiting organizations over the past few months about their recruiting processes <a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/mcq2LgXfiPGlBvjpWpeankv5LSAkqmE4gF7fPRclLChfD65JrBUE1ESbExdH0RkKQ4tD9mRYCq7IdG4XZka2Ahe8uDtbD7jz/salesrecruitersdecreasetimetofill.jpeg" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/mcq2LgXfiPGlBvjpWpeankv5LSAkqmE4gF7fPRclLChfD65JrBUE1ESbExdH0RkKQ4tD9mRYCq7IdG4XZka2Ahe8uDtbD7jz/salesrecruitersdecreasetimetofill.jpeg?width=250" width="250"></img></a> and strategies. And one feeling that keeps coming up is that they feel like they are becoming too process oriented. They feel hijacked by their requisition based…</p>
<p>We've had a lot of conversations with recruiting organizations over the past few months about their recruiting processes <a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/mcq2LgXfiPGlBvjpWpeankv5LSAkqmE4gF7fPRclLChfD65JrBUE1ESbExdH0RkKQ4tD9mRYCq7IdG4XZka2Ahe8uDtbD7jz/salesrecruitersdecreasetimetofill.jpeg" target="_self"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/mcq2LgXfiPGlBvjpWpeankv5LSAkqmE4gF7fPRclLChfD65JrBUE1ESbExdH0RkKQ4tD9mRYCq7IdG4XZka2Ahe8uDtbD7jz/salesrecruitersdecreasetimetofill.jpeg?width=250" width="250" class="align-right"/></a> and strategies. And one feeling that keeps coming up is that they feel like they are becoming too process oriented. They feel hijacked by their requisition based process and feel like their recruiting teams are focused on and rewarded for the wrong activities (i.e. pushing candidates along the process instead of finding the best candidates). They are filling jobs but don't feel like they are bringing in the best quality candidates for their organization.</p>
<h2>Analyzing Time to Fill</h2>
<p>Time to Fill has been used to measure the effectiveness of recruiters for a long time. And the metric is really trying to get how well recruiters are at meeting the human capital needs of the organization. And while it's something that should be measured and used as a data point, there are a few flaws in the outcomes it promotes.</p>
<p>First, Time to Fill rarely factors in the quality of the candidate that is ultimately hired. A recruiter will get credit any filled requisition and thus is incentivized to move candidates along the process as fast as possible. Second, in many cases Time to Fill can be affected by many factors outside of the recruiter's control such as the hiring manager interview process. Third, it stops at the hire stage and doesn't take into affect how successful the hire is at the organization, which is something that should be measured and reported alongside this metric.</p>
<h2>Alternatives to Time to Fill</h2>
<p>While Time to Fill can be a data point when evaluating your recruiting team, it shouldn't be the only measure of success. There are some other alternatives that you may also want to look into. For this, I'd recommend a look at Jessica Lee's post <a title="Time to Fill Metrics" href="http://fistfuloftalent.com/2011/02/move-over-time-to-fill-metrics.html" target="_blank">"Move Over "Time to Fill" Metric"</a>. There are some nice ideas on metrics that may better reward recruiters for the right activities.</p>
<p>A few of note, include:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Quality of Hire:</strong> This will give you a measure of the satisfaction of the Hiring manager over the hire of an employee over certain time intervals. While this would require your organization to be able to measure employee performance and match it back to a recruiter and source, it is something that should be measured.</li>
<li><strong>Number of candidates per hire:</strong> This focuses on the recruiter's ability to present high quality candidates to hiring managers. Thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/DwayneLay" target="_blank">Dwayne Lay</a> for this one.</li>
<li><strong>Time to Present Candidate:</strong> Measuring the time recruiter's need to present qualified candidates to the hiring manager.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Focus on Quality Metrics</h2>
<p>In addition to time and process metrics, I see organizations wanting to have a greater focus on measuring candidate quality for all the recruitment marketing activities they do. From the recruitment sources they market through to candidate sourcing campaigns to Talent Network marketing initiatives, they want to understand the activities that their recruiting team are executing that are bringing in the most qualified candidates. With the hope of improving their <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> mix to drive more quality through their recruitment strategy.</p>
<p>When I speak about quality, I'm not just talking about Quality of Hire although that's important. You will also want to measure sources and activities (job boards, search engines, sourcing, Career Site, Talent Network, marketing campaigns, social networks, etc.) based on what you determine a qualified candidate to be in your process. Is it getting screened by your recruiters? Is it successfully getting to the 2nd stage of the interview process? Is it getting to the final stages? Once you figure out how to classify candidates, it's time to use your ATS and your recruitment marketing technology provider to begin measuring candidates that reach these classifications and track it back to the originating source. This will give you a clearer view of where qualified candidates are coming from and what actions are really driving quality in your recruitment strategy.</p>
<h2>Getting away from Requisition based thinking</h2>
<p>For many organizations, their process is dictated by the requisition process of their ATS. They have new requisitions come up to their process and they task their recruiters to find talent to fill this requisition. Unfortunately, for some organizations they start anew for every requisition. However, there are a number of organizations that are trying to turn this thought process on its head and focus more on finding quality candidates and less on filling specific requisitions.</p>
<p>There are a few schools of thought here that may be of interest. First, is the idea of focusing on skills and culture fit in candidates first and screening them before you ever put them to a job. Only after they are through the initial vetting process will they be matched to a specific open job requisition by a recruiter. In this way, the company tries to ensure company and skill fit before they put them to a requisition and present them to hiring managers. They create a pool of qualified candidates for recruiters to best match candidates to the right jobs to hopefully ensure better matches for candidates and hiring managers.</p>
<p>Second, is the concept of creating relationships with candidates through a Talent Network before a job position opens up. In doing this you are building targeted pipelines based on skills and culture fit that align with your organization and in a perfect world, providing mass customized messaging to the specific candidate populations.</p>
<p>Organizations are understanding the need to create better more lasting relationships with quality candidates in their process as it offers many important benefits. By creating a <a title="Talent Network" href="http://www.smashfly.com/TalentNetwork.aspx" target="_blank">Talent Network</a>, you have the potential to turnaround job requisitions quicker with qualified candidates as you've already done the work to find and qualify the candidate and can tap that resource when a new opportunity is available. Also, if done correctly, you should be able to have more information on these candidates as you've known them longer to be able to screen and test fit.</p>
<p>In terms of measuring the success of these initiatives, organizations are starting to measure this with new <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a>. Metrics like length of relationship until apply and source of influence are helping figure out how to better engage and create these relationships. Also, just as important, the Talent Network needs to be measured side by side against all other initiatives from <a title="Global Job Distribution" href="http://www.smashfly.com/GlobalJobPosting.aspx" target="_blank">job distribution</a> to proactive sourcing, in it's ability to drive qualified candidates and hires into the process.</p>
<h2>Improving Candidate Quality</h2>
<p>To improve the quality of your candidate population, you need to first know what activities and sources are driving qualified candidates into your process. This starts with defining what a qualified candidate means to your organization in terms of skill-set and culture fit. And then goes into the metrics you use to determine success of the hires you make. While Time to Fill and Cost per Hire are data points to be taken in consideration, quality metrics like Quality of Hire and Quality of source can and should be used to determine the success of the hiring team and the initiatives they are executing. It's with these metrics that you can begin to improve your process to find more successful hires.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/Q15cB"/></p>5 Best Recruitment Marketing Articles of the Week 1.26.13 to 2.1.13tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-02-01:502551:BlogPost:16589302013-02-01T15:30:00.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">recruitment </a><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/mcq2LgXfiPGwyLr1rQdWU5KVBWURZ0TZh*0WYYoFaiTwCPx17Yc91bjg8V2uyQm5x0YvNNzlfBcsVfoqJNLNiz1wUdL648tZ/weeklyroundup.jpg" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/mcq2LgXfiPGwyLr1rQdWU5KVBWURZ0TZh*0WYYoFaiTwCPx17Yc91bjg8V2uyQm5x0YvNNzlfBcsVfoqJNLNiz1wUdL648tZ/weeklyroundup.jpg?width=250" width="250"></img></a> <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">marketing</a>, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article,…</p>
<p>Here is our weekly feature in which we share the top articles we enjoyed from the past week about <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">recruitment </a><a href="http://api.ning.com:80/files/mcq2LgXfiPGwyLr1rQdWU5KVBWURZ0TZh*0WYYoFaiTwCPx17Yc91bjg8V2uyQm5x0YvNNzlfBcsVfoqJNLNiz1wUdL648tZ/weeklyroundup.jpg" target="_self"><img src="http://api.ning.com:80/files/mcq2LgXfiPGwyLr1rQdWU5KVBWURZ0TZh*0WYYoFaiTwCPx17Yc91bjg8V2uyQm5x0YvNNzlfBcsVfoqJNLNiz1wUdL648tZ/weeklyroundup.jpg?width=250" class="align-right" width="250"/></a><a href="http://www.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">marketing</a>, social recruiting and anything else in the recruiting space. In this article, we'll be talking about hiring process mods, quality candidates, employer branding, Career Site metrics and recruitment content.</p>
<p>Also, here is <a href="http://hrexaminer.com/five_links_smorgasbord/?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HRExaminer+%28HR+Examiner+with+John+Sumser%29" target="_blank">John Sumser's list of 5 Links</a> and <a href="http://www.sourcecon.com/news/2013/02/01/january-jobs-up-157000-revisions-push-2012-job-growth-over-2-million/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sourcecon+%28SourceCon+News%29" target="_blank">news of job growth in January</a>.</p>
<p>Here are the articles that interested us this week (in no particular order), enjoy!:</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://steveboese.squarespace.com/journal/2013/1/29/modding-the-hiring-process.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter" target="_blank">Modding the Hiring Process</a> by Steve Boese (<a title="Steve Boese" href="https://twitter.com/SteveBoese" target="_blank">@SteveBoese</a>)</p>
<p>This is a great story of how WibiData found an interesting and powerful way to connect with their target candidates. Who would have thought it was Portal.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.recruitingunblog.com/you-deserve-your-crappy-response/?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter" target="_blank">You Deserve Your Crappy Response</a> by Bill Boorman (<a href="https://twitter.com/BillBoorman" target="_blank">@BillBoorman</a>)</p>
<p>Interesting post by Bill on quantity vs. quality entering your hiring process. My take on this is that you need to be measuring every source you use based on qualified candidates and hires they produce and make decisions off of this data.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://hrexaminer.com/dear-xxx-if-they-wont-hire-you-we-will/?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HRExaminer+%28HR+Examiner+with+John+Sumser%29" target="_blank">Dear XXX, If They Won't Hire You, We Will</a> by John Sumser (<a href="https://twitter.com/JohnSumser" target="_blank">@JohnSumser</a>)</p>
<p>Nice share of Smith and Wollensky's employer branding efforts and great example of targeted messaging to a specific candidate population.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.ere.net/2013/01/31/now-is-a-good-time-to-take-the-measure-of-your-career-site/#more-30073" target="_blank">Now is a good time to take measure of your Career Site</a> by John Zappe (<a href="https://twitter.com/ERE_net" target="_blank">@ERE_net</a>)</p>
<p>Good reminder by John to review your Career Site metrics. By measuring how your content and Career Site performs, it should enable you to understand how to produce better content. Also, including your Career Site in your <a title="Source of Hire Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/IntegratedPipelineReports.aspx" target="_blank">Source of Hire metrics</a> is important as well.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><a href="http://www.sodexousacareersblog.com/2013/01/5-faqs-about-jobs-at-sodexo.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SodexoCareers+%28Sodexo+Careers%29" target="_blank">5 FAQs about Jobs at Sodexo</a> by Chloe Rada (<a href="https://twitter.com/crada" target="_blank">@crada</a>)</p>
<p>This is a great example of simple but great content that you can create for candidates on your <a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">Career Site</a>. It's helpful and provides some insight into the opportunities available at Sodexo and hopefully should help the candidate experience with the how-to's.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Hope you enjoy the list. If you have any articles I should add to the list feel free to add them to the comments or follow us on Twitter <a href="http://www.twitter.com/smashfly" target="_blank">@smashfly</a>.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/U15aZ"/></p>6 Career Site Mistakes you may be doing todaytag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-01-29:502551:BlogPost:16576002013-01-29T18:30:00.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>With the information boom, candidates expect employers to provide them with the necessary information in order to make an informed decision on their careers. And while this happens via social recruiting, conversations with employees and information found on the internet (whether that’s sites like Glassdoor or message boards), a lot of the impression that candidates have for your organization can be gathered through your Career Site. And in many cases, it represents your…</p>
<p><em> </em></p>
<p>With the information boom, candidates expect employers to provide them with the necessary information in order to make an informed decision on their careers. And while this happens via social recruiting, conversations with employees and information found on the internet (whether that’s sites like Glassdoor or message boards), a lot of the impression that candidates have for your organization can be gathered through your Career Site. And in many cases, it represents your chance to control the message and conversation.</p>
<p>But creating a robust <a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">Career Site</a> is hard, right? Well, with innovation in technology, it is no longer the beast that it once was. It’s no longer necessary to have a web team create every new page and piece of content (although a web team approved template is essential) as recruiting teams now can be given the power to create messaging that resonates with the candidates they are trying to recruit. Now the Career Site can be a constant evolution of your value proposition as an employer and not a site that you re-design every 5 years and forget about. It should be flexible to changing trends and messaging in order to provide the targeted messaging needed to connect with candidates.</p>
<p>While technology exists to make this happen, many organizations are still living in the past with their Career Sites. Whether it’s using just a standard jobs page or using their ATS job site technology (some are better than others), they lack the internal resources to really execute on a comprehensive branding strategy.</p>
<p>I look through Career Sites on a daily basis and while some are great, there are a good amount that need some work. And for these, I see a lot of the same mistakes keep coming up. So here are the top 6 that I see all the time:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Google Can’t Find Your Site: </strong> This all goes to your <a title="Recruitment SEO" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentSEO.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment SEO strategy</a>. At the very basic, it’s making sure every page on your Career Site has the right targeted keywords as well ensuring that every job has their own separate webpage that can be indexed by Google. One of the biggest mistakes I see in regard to this is putting all the job pages behind a job search wall. While having job search is an important element of any Career Site implementing it in this way essentially puts a bottleneck in the process. And in many cases, it prevents Google and other search engine bots from navigating and indexing your individual job pages.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Generic Content:</strong> Many of the sites I come across have the same content as everyone else. They usually will have a simple job search, an about us page with simple boilerplate and maybe a “Why work for Us?” section. Typically this last section is about good benefits and great culture. While this can be fine, the organizations that are really excelling are taking a different approach. First, they are going deeper into their value proposition from career tracks to getting employees front and center to explain the culture. Second, they typically are using a variety of content from text pages to social streams to blog articles to video to images. This helps to engage candidates in a number of different ways, providing different options for a candidate to engage.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>No Tight Source Capture: </strong> This is a big one that I’m not sure how many organizations really understand or know about. For most Career Sites, they are most likely not capturing the source data properly. They are fine if the candidate is coming directly to the Career Site but it’s when the candidate jumps to other pages from that initial job page that they lose real insight into a candidates path to a job.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Here’s an example. Say a candidate is searching for a job and finds your opportunity on Monster (or another job board). They click the link and come to the job page on your Career Site. After taking a closer look, they realize that they are unqualified for the position and instead use search to find a more suitable job. After going to a few pages on the Career Site, they find a job that fits their skills and applies. In this case, many Career Site solutions will list the source as the final Career Site page. But anyone can see that the job board should get credit for that application as well.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">When looking at potential systems to manage your Career Site, it’s important to ask about tight source capture of <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> so you can truly understand the impact of your Career Site along with the other <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> efforts you are using.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Not Yet Mobile Friendly: </strong> Mobile is becoming more and more important by the day and organizations need to address it in their sourcing, engagement and most importantly, there branding strategy. Ensuring that your Career Site is accessible and well displayed on mobile devices is a must and many organizations are lagging in this regard. This doesn’t mean that organizations need to create mobile apps but moreso that they have something such as an mSite that provides candidates with a full Career Site experience from their mobile devices.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Not Ready to Apply, Go Away: </strong> This is a big offender that can be easily fixed. Say a candidate visits your site but doesn’t find a job that fits their skills today. You need to have something on your Career Site that enables them to engage without applying for a job. Whether that’s links to social recruiting profiles, job alerts or my favorite a “Join our Talent Network” form, there should be a way for them to opt-in to receive engagement from you. This enables you to provide them with content and jobs that fits their interests to keep them warm. And with the relationships you build with these candidates, when the right job opens up, you can get them apply for the position.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Did I Apply?:</strong> This is something that I see on sites from time to time. Basically, they require candidates to create an account for their Career Site and then send them to create another account through their ATS. Not only is this very confusing for candidates but it is a severe breach in the candidate experience. You’ll see that I recommend you capture some basic information before a candidate gets to the apply process (in case they drop off) but this should be brief and less intrusive. Creating two separate accounts is not the way to do it.</p>
<p>All these mistakes can be easily fixed with a comprehensive branding strategy. The key is taking the time to really think out what you want to be able to do, the candidates you are looking to recruit, the metrics that are integral to measuring success and then determine the systems that can help you get there. We are in an age where people consume and expect there to be information. And if they don’t find it through your channels, they will more than likely find it through other third parties where you have no control.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/Y15Yx"/></p>A Few Recruiting Resolutions for the New Yeartag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2013-01-03:502551:BlogPost:16408792013-01-03T17:11:10.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>With the New Year, it’s about time we got to announcing our resolutions. If you are like me, I always look at the New Year as a chance to improve and with that come the forming yearly goals for myself. For 2013, in addition to the usual get in better shape and career oriented goals, I’ve reflected on some personal and overarching recruiting industry goals that I hope can be achieved.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Here are some of my resolutions for 2013:</p>
<h2>Personal Resolutions</h2>
<p>For myself…</p>
<p>With the New Year, it’s about time we got to announcing our resolutions. If you are like me, I always look at the New Year as a chance to improve and with that come the forming yearly goals for myself. For 2013, in addition to the usual get in better shape and career oriented goals, I’ve reflected on some personal and overarching recruiting industry goals that I hope can be achieved.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Here are some of my resolutions for 2013:</p>
<h2>Personal Resolutions</h2>
<p>For myself and what we do here on the SmashFly Blog, there’s 2 main goals I hope to achieve in 2013. They are below:</p>
<p> </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>A Greater Variety of Content: </strong> Over the past two years, we’ve leveraged the blog as a way to provide ideas and tips on recruitment and talent acquisition. While it will still remain our main vehicle for sharing great stories from our conversations with innovative recruiting organizations, I also want to diversify the types of content we provide the recruiting community . In 2013, I want to try and experiment with different mediums from audio, video, white papers and e-books and try to provide more helpful content that readers can take and share with others. <em>And hopefully I can get over the sound of my own voice on video.</em></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Better Foster Community:</strong> We are always consistently trying to be helpful by bringing up new ideas and concepts that can be relevant pieces to a successful recruiting strategy. And in 2013, we hope to provide other thoughts and opinions on many of these ideas through the blog and other vehicles we use. I also personally want to participate in more one on one conversations as well as Twitter chats that can expand this pools of ideas.</p>
<h2>Recruiting Resolutions</h2>
<p>2012 was the year of mobile, social and big data and I fully expect much deeper look at these areas. Companies are just starting to dip their toes in the water and in 2013 I expect the strategies are going to become much more concrete. Here’s a few resolutions I have for the <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> industry:</p>
<p> </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Focus on the Right Data:</strong> Big Data is a term thrown around a lot in the past few months and while important, I think it can be a little overwhelming to many organizations. The think the real key for organizations is to sit down and think about the information they want and need to make better talent decisions. It’s not about capturing everything but capturing the right things.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Once this foundation is set, it will be all about how they can better capture this data accurately through technology and disseminate it into easy to use reports and <a title="Recruitment Analytics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">analytics</a>. This can be difficult especially with this data being housed many times in different systems, so the key is figuring out what you need and how to integrate it all together.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Seamless Mobile Experience:</strong> With users using their phones to access the web more than ever, it’s becoming more important for organizations to have a mobile presence. This is especially true for recruiting. Organizations need to try and make reviewing content and searching for jobs easier on these devices and create an experience that fits <a title="Mobile Recruiting" href="http://www.smashfly.com/MobileRecruiting.aspx" target="_blank">mobile</a>. I think in many cases the solution is to dumb down the <a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">Career Site</a> for mobile but that can be a mistake. The key is to simplify what you provide but make sure the experience is still robust to help candidates answer the question, “do I want to work for this company?”</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Never Start at Square One: </strong> While many organizations are passed this point with their recruiting, others still approach every new open position as a one-off. While some proactive recruiting methods need to be used in order to find and engage with new candidates, organizations also should be utilizing their own connections from past recruiting and sourcing initiatives to fill these positions.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">These include the silver medalists that exist in your ATS, candidates who’ve opted into your Talent Network, candidates sourced for specific skill-sets as well as past referrals. There is no real excuse for not using these connections when hiring for a new position. They are a free channel for you to engage with and in many cases you have more information on them in order to make a more informed hiring decision.</p>
<p>These are just a few of the resolutions that I hope the recruiting industry embraces in 2013.</p>
<p>What resolutions do you have? I would love to hear them, share in the comments below!</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/d15CN"/></p>All I Want for Christmas: Recruiting Editiontag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2012-12-20:502551:BlogPost:16364772012-12-20T15:15:45.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>With Christmas only a few days away, I figured it was a great time to get my wish list together for 2013. But this year it’s not about toys and gifts but more so about the ideas and strategies that I hope catch on in the new year. Ones that I think can help recruiting organizations derive more value out of the resources they have and in turn recruit more qualified talent into their organizations.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So without delay, here are the 10 things I want to see recruiting…</p>
<p>With Christmas only a few days away, I figured it was a great time to get my wish list together for 2013. But this year it’s not about toys and gifts but more so about the ideas and strategies that I hope catch on in the new year. Ones that I think can help recruiting organizations derive more value out of the resources they have and in turn recruit more qualified talent into their organizations.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So without delay, here are the 10 things I want to see recruiting organizations incorporate after the Christmas Holiday:</p>
<p> </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Begin tracking Quality of Source</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">For any organization to be successful, it’s important to be able to track and measure everything you do based on the desired outcomes that you determine. For many recruiting organizations, this is focused on bringing in qualified candidates for their positions.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">So it’s crucial for organizations to measure this and apply these <a title="Source of Hire Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/IntegratedPipelineReports.aspx" target="_blank">quality of source metrics</a> to every source they use to drive candidates to apply. This doesn’t just stand for job boards but should be applied across the board to social networks, Career Site, sourcing campaigns and other recruiting initiatives.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Improve Marketing Messaging</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">While you want to measure sources based on the quality candidates they bring into your organization, you also need to look at the macro effects your recruitment messaging has on your recruitment funnel. With simple <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> like views, apply clicks and applicants, you can get a great view of how good your messaging is on moving candidates from one stage of the funnel to the next. If you are seeing significant drop-off at any of these stages for a specific job or across the board, you then know that there is a big problem with your messaging.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">It’s at this point you know it’s time to take another look at your job descriptions or applicant process, make some changes to improve and keep measuring it until you have a process that limits this drop-off.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Build a Talent Network</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">In many cases, candidates just aren’t ready to apply to a company and organizations need to be able to provide an alternative way for them to engage with the recruiting organization whether that’s a <a title="Talent Network" href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2012/12/12/what-is-a-talent-network-part-1/" target="_blank">Talent Network</a> or social recruiting profiles. The important part of this is to make it available everywhere that your employer brand interacts with candidates. This includes during your job apply process, in your job ads, on every page of your Career Site, at recruiting events such as Career Fairs, on recruiter email signatures or on your careers blog. Make it easy for candidates to opt-in to receive content from your organization.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Develop Target Populations</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Before you start to recruit for positions, it’s important to understand what skills and candidate populations you really want to target in your strategy. While they may be diverse, there are more than likely skills that you recruit for much more often than others.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">With these skills identified, it will make it easier to use your Talent Network to create targeted pipelines for these types of candidates and for you to use metrics to hone in on the best <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> mix to attract these different candidate populations.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Content Rich Engagement</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Once you build your Talent Network, you are not done by a long shot. You need to begin creating those skill defined talent pipelines and start figuring out the content that these specific candidate populations want from your organization. While this will most definitely include targeted job opportunities, you will also want to provide unique content as well.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">This content can be anything from company news, Career information, industry news and education materials, job seeking tips, etc. The key is to produce it and use metrics to help determine the types of content that work well for each of the candidate populations you engage with.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Get Rid of the Generic Career Site</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">The best candidates have more choices than ever before when they are looking a new job and the <a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">Career Site</a> should reflect that. Gone should be a generic 3-4 Career Pages and Job Search (which is usually not SEO friendly) and in it’s place should be a Careers microsite with content and messaging targeted toward the different candidate populations and skills that you recruit for.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Your Career Site can and should have some general information on it’s homepage with info on the organization, benefits, jobs and the recruiting process. But you should also go deeper in telling candidates what’s the benefit of working at the organization from their perspective. It’s great to have a “Why work for Us” page with a global view but with today’s technology it’s just as easy to provide a “Why work for Us as an Engineer” page and content that is much more targeted to a candidate you are trying to recruit. The whole goal here is to better customize the experience for candidates.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Get Serious about the Candidate Experience</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Organizations across the world are beginning to understand that the candidate experience is no longer just a recruiting issue but an overall business and branding issue. A bad experience of a candidate not receiving a response on their application can have the same affect a bad customer service experience for a company.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">That’s why it’s integral to understand how your process and communication strategy should look from the initial interaction you have with candidates until they become hires in your organization (although you should have an employee communication strategy as well.) Here are some articles that go more deeply in how you can think about your candidate experience and improve it:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a title="Candidate Experience Awards" href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2012/10/11/insights-from-the-candidate-experience-awards-thecandes-at-the-hrtechconf/" target="_blank">Insights from the Candidate Experience Awards</a></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a title="Candidate Experience" href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2012/05/15/closing-the-loop-in-your-candidate-experience/" target="_blank">Closing the Loop on the Candidate Experience</a></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Figure out Mobile</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Mobile is a huge buzzword both in marketing and recruiting right now. The real question is understanding really what you should care about with Mobile as it’s application can differ pretty widely based on what you want to accomplish with it.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">One area that I think is crucial for recruiting is making sure that candidates can view your recruiting content and jobs via their mobile phones. Whether it’s a <a title="Mobile Recruiting" href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2012/08/06/mobile-recruiting-app-or-mobile-friendly-career-site/" target="_blank">mSite or an app</a>, having a way for candidates to easily be able to browse jobs on the go (and opt-in to your Talent Network) is a great place to start in <a title="Mobile Recruiting" href="http://www.smashfly.com/MobileRecruiting.aspx" target="_blank">mobile recruiting</a>.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Be Smart about Social</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Social is another buzzword that I think some recruiters are still confused with. While social can be a powerful tool when used correctly in recruiting, it’s important to have a strategy and clear objectives before you enter the social landscape.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Two tips for when you begin thinking about social. First, do not expect short-term results. It takes time to build a following and work out the kinks in what works for the audience you are trying to attract. So don’t be saddened by lack of results in the first 2 months. Second, don’t feel like you have to have a presence everywhere (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Istagram, etc.). It’s better to be great on one platform than mediocre on several. Figure out where your candidates interact and engage and go there.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Don’t try to be all things to all people</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">While you should always be trying new things and have a multi-pronged strategy, it’s important to always look to focus on what’s really producing results. Don’t feel obligated to do social or have diversification if you have done the work and it hasn’t produced results for you. Measure the results of your initiatives and always look to expand the avenues that work and cut the fat of the ones that don’t.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Start thinking comprehensively</strong></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">It’s important as an industry that we get out of this silo’d mindset where each recruiting activity is run in isolation. There’s no reason why job posting, Talent Networks, sourcing, employer branding, SEO, mobile and other initiatives shouldn’t run under the same purview. And in many cases, if you begin to think of them as part of a whole, you can see much greater success.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">For instance, a Talent Network will be more effective if it’s tied into both your job distribution and Career Site strategy. Another example is metrics. By consolidating and centralizing your metrics across all your recruiting assets (job boards, social, mobile, Career Site, sourcing, Talent Network, etc.) and measuring them side by side, you’ll be able to make strategic decisions that make better use of your recruitment budget.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p>Those are all the things that I want for this Christmas Holiday. What is on your wish list?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Share below (include your Twitter handle) and I’ll make sure to add the best ones to this article and share them on Twitter.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Also share your thoughts on the <a href="http://blog.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">SmashFly Blog</a>.</strong></p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/l157X"/></p>Developing your Talent Network strategy - Part 2tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2012-12-18:502551:BlogPost:16356842012-12-18T16:35:32.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p><em>This is the second post in a series on Talent Networks. You can view the first post here, “<a href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2012/12/12/what-is-a-talent-network-part-1/" target="_blank" title="Talent Network">What is a Talent Network?</a>“.</em></p>
<p></p>
<p>In our last post, we set the stage for what a <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/TalentNetwork.aspx" target="_blank" title="Talent Network">Talent Network</a> is and the value it can provide to employers and candidates. In today’s…</p>
<p><em>This is the second post in a series on Talent Networks. You can view the first post here, “<a title="Talent Network" href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2012/12/12/what-is-a-talent-network-part-1/" target="_blank">What is a Talent Network?</a>“.</em></p>
<p></p>
<p>In our last post, we set the stage for what a <a title="Talent Network" href="http://www.smashfly.com/TalentNetwork.aspx" target="_blank">Talent Network</a> is and the value it can provide to employers and candidates. In today’s post, I’d like to take a deeper look at what you need to think about as you are developing your Talent Network strategy.</p>
<h2>Developing your Talent Network strategy</h2>
<p>The first step when creating a successful Talent Network is to develop your strategy and start thinking about process. Without a process in place to guide recruiters, your organization more than likely will not get as much out of the Talent Network as they can.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>When you begin to develop your strategy, it’s important to start thinking about a few main areas.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Growing your Talent Network:</strong> This mainly focuses on how you actually get candidates into your Talent Network. Encompassed are decisions on the recruiting destinations you want candidates to be able to opt-in from, how and the type of candidates your team proactively sources and how you set expectations for the value you provide Talent Network members.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Targeting Candidate Populations:</strong> Once candidates enter your system, it’s important to be able to segment and create targeted candidate populations. Whether it’s based on skill set, job type or another criteria, you need to figure out how to effectively create talent pipelines from the candidates you engage with. This will allow for better more targeted engagement and communication opportunities.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Campaigning and Engagement:</strong> This part of the strategy may differ bases on the way that the candidates enter your Talent Network or might be the same for all candidates. The key here is being able to get beyond the job spam and to make the campaigns you run to Talent Network candidates valuable to them. This means using a system that enables more targeted engagement and a content strategy that provides different types of helpful and relevant content to share with candidates.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Keeping candidate information fresh:</strong> One of the biggest flaws of many Talent Network strategies is over-looking the need to keep all candidate information up to date. Candidate records that are 7 months old are much less useful for targeted engagement than ones that have been updated in the last month. The key here is using social recruiting profiles and simple trigger campaigns to keep apprised with candidates careers.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Measuring Success:</strong> Like everything else you do from a <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> perspective, it’s integral that you measure the success of your Talent Network strategy with key <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a>. You should use these metrics to compare and contrast success of your Talent Network vs. all the other campaigns and initiatives you do from a recruiting perspective, so you can make better decisions on where to best use your existing resources.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Leveraging Technology:</strong> I’ll touch upon this briefly here but in order to successfully build and engage with your Talent Network, you’ll need a system to manage this candidate information and communications. Once you determine, what you want with all the above areas, it’s time to find a <a title="Recruitment CRM" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentCRMDatabase.aspx" target="_blank">CRM</a> or other system that enables you to accomplish it all.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>What’s Next?</h2>
<p>This post is supposed to set the stage for the next series of posts that will go more deeply into each of these areas. Once you have the strategy in place, it’s all about execution and best deploying resources to make sure you are getting the most value you can out of your Talent Network.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Check back in to the <a href="http://blog.smashfly.com/" target="_blank">SmashFly Blog</a> over the next few months to see the next posts in this series.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/l155v"/></p>5 Habits of Successful Recruiting Organizationstag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2012-11-20:502551:BlogPost:16235872012-11-20T16:19:23.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>This will be a short article and by no means is meant to be comprehensive. However, as I’ve been talking with recruiting organizations, listening to their stories at conferences, and hearing tidbits through the grapevine online and through prospect meetings, there are a number of key insights I hear time and time again that I think can be very helpful.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So what are recruiting organizations doing that enable them to be successful. Here are a few general habits that they…</p>
<p>This will be a short article and by no means is meant to be comprehensive. However, as I’ve been talking with recruiting organizations, listening to their stories at conferences, and hearing tidbits through the grapevine online and through prospect meetings, there are a number of key insights I hear time and time again that I think can be very helpful.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So what are recruiting organizations doing that enable them to be successful. Here are a few general habits that they usually exhibit:</p>
<p> </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Start with a plan:</strong> Every successful recruiting organization I’ve run into has had a set plan and process in place that was well thought out. They take the time to talk to other organizations and vendors to understand what other companies are doing and match this to their own recruiting goals to set up a process and strategy that fits their organization. Most importantly, they take the time to re-examine this process in set time periods to bring new ideas into the fold.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Measure and Improve:</strong> While they may have a set plan in place, they are flexible enough to make changes to improve their process. That’s where <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> come in. In all cases, they are able measure their activities to help them determine what’s truly working and not working in their process. They use this information to make real-time strategic decisions that help them improve their overall ROI.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Think strategically about Technology:</strong> While they don’t succeed solely based on <a title="Recruitment Technology" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMarketingPlatform.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment technology</a>, they view technology as an important part of their strategy. They identify tools and platforms that are able to add value to their process and enable them to uniquely accomplish the tasks they need in order to succeed.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Empower their Recruiters:</strong> While they work with their executive team to set up their strategy, they rely heavily on their recruiting team to execute and make decisions in their process. They treat them as independent thinks geared toward improving the overall process.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Intellectually Curious:</strong> While their current process is currently helping them reach their goals, they are not satisfied with this success. They are always on the lookout for new ways to attract better talent. These are the organizations that were the first to jump into social recruiting, build Talent Networks and are looking at ways to improve their <a title="Mobile Recruiting" href="http://www.smashfly.com/MobileRecruiting.aspx" target="_blank">mobile recruiting</a>. They are always interested in finding and trying the next big thing.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p>Highly successful organizations are doing a number of things exceptionally outside of this list as well. However it is this foundation of setting up a plan, process and strategy that is measurable, leveraging both people and technology to drive it and keeping on top of the latest <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> trends, that really drives innovation and enables the best organizations find the right talent.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/L14pn"/></p>The Different Levels of Engagement with Candidatestag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2012-11-01:502551:BlogPost:16190122012-11-01T15:25:14.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>The Candidate Experience is one of the biggest, most talked about topics in recruiting today and for good reason. With more candidates looking for work, companies are dealing with increased levels of potential employees for every job position they recruit for. This leaves them with more time needed to screen and interview candidates and less time to have one on one engagement with these candidates.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Obviously, one on one engagement with candidates would be preferable in the…</p>
<p>The Candidate Experience is one of the biggest, most talked about topics in recruiting today and for good reason. With more candidates looking for work, companies are dealing with increased levels of potential employees for every job position they recruit for. This leaves them with more time needed to screen and interview candidates and less time to have one on one engagement with these candidates.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Obviously, one on one engagement with candidates would be preferable in the recruiting process but with the increase in overall volume of candidates, it’s something that isn’t feasible for many organizations. Add onto that all the candidates that opt-in to your Talent Network and you have a whole new group of candidates that your recruiting organization should be engaging with to keep them warm while positions that fit their skill-set open up.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>While we hear a lot about the need to engage with candidates, very rarely do we really break down what this engagement is and the different levels of engagement we have with candidates. Not all engagement needs to be one on one with candidates but it will differ based on the goal and platform that you are using to engage (whether that’s opt-in emails, social networks or in the interview process.)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Here are the different levels of engagement that you may have with candidates:</p>
<p> </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Information Gathering:</strong> This refers to all the recruiting content you produce and put online. From <a title="Global Job Distribution" href="http://www.smashfly.com/GlobalJobPosting.aspx" target="_blank">job distribution</a> campaigns to <a title="Career Site Optimization" href="http://www.smashfly.com/CareerSiteOptimization.aspx" target="_blank">Career Site</a> messaging to your Glassdoor profile, candidates are engaging with your recruiting brand and collecting information on your organization. This is a one way level of engagement that the candidate initiates. The only thing you can control is the information you provide for candidates to engage with.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">This level of engagement is the least powerful but still can be valuable. In most cases, this can lead candidates to engage with you further and will lead to better more powerful engagement in the future. You can tell how good your organization is doing with this engagement through capturing <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> on all this content.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Introduction:</strong> The platform for this type of engagement may differ. It can be the candidate reaching out to a recruiter on a social network, through a IM chat, on LinkedIn, opting in to your <a title="Talent Network" href="http://www.smashfly.com/TalentNetwork.aspx" target="_blank">Talent Network</a> or just simply applying for a position. In any case, the candidate is initiating the next level of engagement with your organization. They want to speak with your recruiters and get one on one engagement. The key here is to make sure that you set a reasonable expectation for the candidate. This can be sending an email confirmation on receiving the inquiry and what they should expect from an interaction perspective. Setting realistic expectations is key.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Personal: </strong> The most important engagement step in the process is one on one engagement between candidates and recruiters (as well as hiring managers). This is important during every step of the screening and interview phases of the process and is where you really build a relationship with a candidate. The key is to make sure that the relationship is not lost with qualified candidates that don’t get the job and that you communicate with them directly no matter if it’s good or bad news about the hiring decision.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Reminder:</strong> I also like to refer to this as the “I’m still here” phase. Basically this is how you engage with candidates that have showed interest in your organization but have yet to find the right fit. These can be candidates that opted into your Talent Network or potentially the silver medalists from job positions you hired for. This level of engagement can differ depending on your organizations approach. For highly qualified individuals that you have already screened, recruiters may be reaching out to them every once in a while to gauge interest and speak to them about their career. This is optimal but time consuming.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">For candidates that you have yet to screen but have expressed interest, you may use email or SMS to remain top of mind with them. From email newsletters to targeted job listings, you provide them with the chance to engage on a more intimate level. The key here is providing value in the communications you send to these targeted candidate populations. Your main goal here is for them to take the next step to more personal engagement.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p>The important thing when thinking about engagement in your <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> strategy is to determine the needed level of engagement for the different steps in the process. Not all engagement needs to be the highest level (one on one) but you need to make sure to have appropriate level of interaction and communication when candidates choose to engage with your recruiting brand.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Use all the tools at your disposal to ensure that you are not leaving candidates in the dark and ensure that they satisfied with the level of engagement and responsiveness with your organization. Not every interaction can be a one on one engagement, the key is to make sure the right moments are.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/f14ct"/></p>Is it time for your end of year recruiting check-up?tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2012-10-30:502551:BlogPost:16181222012-10-30T15:40:45.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>With the close of 2012 only a few months away, many people are trying to everything in order before the end of the year. From buying presents for the holidays to getting your house ready for winter, there’s a number of things that need to get done before the end of the year. And somewhere on that list is a end of the year doctor check-up (I know it’s on mine) to make sure you’re healthy for the holidays and the beginning of the new year.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>For organizations, the end of the…</p>
<p>With the close of 2012 only a few months away, many people are trying to everything in order before the end of the year. From buying presents for the holidays to getting your house ready for winter, there’s a number of things that need to get done before the end of the year. And somewhere on that list is a end of the year doctor check-up (I know it’s on mine) to make sure you’re healthy for the holidays and the beginning of the new year.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>For organizations, the end of the year is just as hectic and the most important task for most departments is coming up with (and fighting for) their next year’s budget. In order to make these budget considerations, organizations need to fully flesh out what programs and initiatives they want in their strategy next year and what they need to support them from a technology and resources perspective.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This is why it’s important to do an end of year check-up on your <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> strategy. Determine what you did well, what you would like to improve and what initiatives you do not currently run that you would like to in the future. When sitting down and looking at your recruitment strategy, it’s important to look at two things in particular.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>First, you need to make sure you have the metrics to evaluate all the initiatives you run from a recruiting and sourcing perspective. This includes job board postings, social recruiting, referrals, web sourcing, events and all the other places or initiatives you used to attract candidates. Make sure to have comprehensive <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> for all these channels (in terms of qualified candidates and hires) and a centralized place to capture and analyze all this information. By doing this, you will be able to see what in your recruitment marketing mix truly helped you attract qualified talent which can help you better allocate your budget to the right channels. (And also understand what channels you need to use from a compliance standpoint.)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Second, take a look at your process and start to focus on improving it. This may include re-evaluating your apply process, identifying bottlenecks in the attraction funnel, determining ways to get more value out of your job posts (i.e. <a href="http://www.smashfly.com/TalentNetwork.aspx" target="_blank">Talent Network Forms</a>) and looking more deeply into the candidate experience.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Once you’ve done this review, it’s important to start planning your budget based on the apparent health of your recruiting organization. Here are a few areas you may want to look at and questions you should ask:</p>
<p> </p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Recruitment Marketing Mix:</strong> Are the channels we use today helping us achieve our goals? Are there new channels (i.e. social, mobile, etc.) that we want to start using next year?</li>
<li><strong>Technology:</strong> Do we have the right technology for our strategy? Is the current technology we have capable of supporting next year’s strategy? How can we leverage technology to better accomplish our goals and free up recruiters time?</li>
<li><strong>Metrics:</strong> What should we be measuring? What best determines success for our recruiting organization? Can we measure this with our current technology and tools? Is it centralized? Does it help us prove value in our discussions with executives?</li>
<li><strong>Overall resources:</strong> What resources and personnel do we need to make our strategy successful?</li>
<li><strong>Future Trends:</strong> What trends are on the horizon in recruiting that we should keep aware of?</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>I encourage you to take a look back at 2012, begin evaluating your recruiting organization performance and determine what you could be doing better. This will not only help you start drafting your budget estimates but should help you in proving why you need this budget in order to be successful in 2013.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/p14bH"/></p>Don’t forget about the Silver Medalists…tag:www.recruitingblogs.com,2012-10-24:502551:BlogPost:16167082012-10-24T16:33:51.000ZChris Brablchttp://www.recruitingblogs.com/profile/ChrisBrablc695
<p>A few weeks ago at HR Technology Conference there was a great session called “<strong>What’s Next? What Talent Acquisition Challenges are Seeking Technology Solutions?”</strong> with a tremendous panel of talent acquisition practitioners (for a more detailed look at insights from this panel, <a href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2012/10/16/what-i-learned-in-chicago-hrtechconf-2012-wrap-up/" target="_blank" title="#HRTechConf 2012">find them here</a>.)</p>
<p>One idea that was brought up during…</p>
<p>A few weeks ago at HR Technology Conference there was a great session called “<strong>What’s Next? What Talent Acquisition Challenges are Seeking Technology Solutions?”</strong> with a tremendous panel of talent acquisition practitioners (for a more detailed look at insights from this panel, <a title="#HRTechConf 2012" href="http://blog.smashfly.com/2012/10/16/what-i-learned-in-chicago-hrtechconf-2012-wrap-up/" target="_blank">find them here</a>.)</p>
<p>One idea that was brought up during the discussion that I think was important was the importance of engagement with candidates. While this needs to happen throughout the entire recruiting process and is the reason for the focus on the candidate experience, one area that was focused on was the value of candidates that you’ve already spoken to that are still qualified for positions. It’s the silver (and bronze) medalists that can hold real recruiting value and will be the main focus of this post.</p>
<p>When we talk about Silver medalists we don’t mean just the one person that was next up for a position but all the qualified (determined by your team) candidates that apply but don’t get a position. Not only do these candidates represent a significant investment of your recruiters and hiring managers time but they also can be great candidates for future job positions.</p>
<p>All of these candidates reside in your Applicant Tracking System but the real question is what do you do with them? Obviously, you want to stay connected with them but how do you do that and what should you focus on when interacting? Many organizations are struggling with this and here are some ways that you may want to think about remaining in contact with these individuals.</p>
<p> </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Engage with them:</strong> First and foremost, once you tell them the bad news of not being hired for the position, make sure to up front set the expectation for reaching back out. Let them know that you thought they were a great candidate and acknowledge that you want to remain engaged. Add them to the recruiting campaigns that you run through email &amp; SMS (but don’t send them irrelevant job opportunities.) Also put them in contact with your social recruiting profiles if you have them.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">By setting the expectation up front, you are acknowledging both your and their commitment to maintaining a relationship. That’s always the first step.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Alert about Targeted Opportunities:</strong> For new job positions, you are going to use similar channels. From <a title="Global Job Distribution" href="http://www.smashfly.com/GlobalJobPosting.aspx" target="_blank">job distribution</a> to job boards &amp; social networks to sourcing from the web, you will find new candidates for your positions. And you should definitely continue to do that.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">But depending on the job, you should already have a number of qualified candidates at the ready to re-engage with on this opportunity. Whether it’s pulling this in your ATS or using a <a title="Recruitment CRM" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentCRMDatabase.aspx" target="_blank">CRM</a> to better house and campaign to these candidates, it’s important that you have these Talent Pipelines that you continuously build and more importantly tap into whenever you have a new position you want to fill.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Keep Up to Date:</strong> Candidates don’t remain stagnant in their careers after you don’t hire them. They are continuously building skills and experience that will help them excel and take on more responsibility down the road. That’s why it’s extremely important to keep track of what your best recruiting candidate contacts are doing with their careers. They might be over-qualified for the type of position they interviewed for before and may be a great fit for a more senior level position now.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">One increasingly utilized way to do this is through social media with the biggest being LinkedIn. When most professionals make a change in their careers this is one of the first places they update their information. Do to this, it’s important to ensure that where you store information on candidates you will be able to update it with information that is pulled from the web. A static contact record will become increasingly obsolete every month that it is not updated.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Employ them Now: </strong> Sometimes you can’t hire a qualified person but you know that a similar position should open up in the next few months and you want to hold onto them. If they are interested in the position, it may be a great opportunity to offer them temp work in the interim especially if they are looking for work without being currently employed. While his doesn’t work for every position you hire but this may be a great opportunity for entry level or recent grad positions. It will give you an opportunity to evaluate the person in a real work setting while giving the candidate some extra income in the interim while they are looking for a position. When a position opens up and you want to hire the candidate, you will more than likely be their first choice of employer.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
<p>When looking at the <a title="Recruitment Metrics" href="http://www.smashfly.com/RecruitmentMetrics.aspx" target="_blank">recruitment metrics</a> you capture, looking at the source of hire can be deceiving. In everything you do from a recruiting perspective, you are looking for ways to increase the number of qualified candidates that come through your door. It’s important to get better at this goal but even more important to utilize and engage with all the qualified candidates that do not become employees at your companies on the first try. If you don’t have a systematized and intelligent way to maintain relationships with these candidates, then you are wasting a huge opportunity in your <a title="Recruitment Marketing" href="http://www.smashfly.com" target="_blank">recruitment marketing</a> strategy.</p>
<p><img src="http://jucy.tw/x14WR"/></p>